Interpreting Politics: Situated Knowledge, India, and the Rudolph Legacy 0190125012, 9780190125011

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Interpreting Politics

Contributors to this Volume: Rina Agarwala Kalaiyarasan Arumugam Amrita Basu John Echeverri-Gent Leela Fernandes Ronald Herring Francis W. Hoeber Christophe Jaffrelot Niraja Gopal Jayal Kristen Renwick Monroe Kamal Sadiq Vivien A. Schmidt Steven I. Wilkinson

Interpreting Politics Situated Knowledge, India, and the Rudolph Legacy

Edited by

John Echeverri-Gent Kamal Sadiq

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in India by Oxford University Press 22 Workspace, 2nd Floor, 1/22 Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi 110002, India

© Oxford University Press, 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. First Edition published in 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-012501-1 ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-012501-2 ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-099128-9 ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-099128-3 Typeset in ITC Giovanni Std 9.5/13 by Tranistics Data Technologies, Kolkata 700 091 Printed in India by Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020

Contributors to this Volume: Rina Agarwala Kalaiyarasan Arumugam Amrita Basu John Echeverri-Gent Leela Fernandes Ronald Herring Francis W. Hoeber Christophe Jaffrelot Niraja Gopal Jayal Kristen Renwick Monroe Kamal Sadiq Vivien A. Schmidt Steven I. Wilkinson

To Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph Inspiring scholars, mentors, and friends

Figures and Tables

Figures 2.1 2.2

The conventional view of context Situated knowledge

5.1

Annual per capita mean income across caste groups in Maharashtra (INR) Annual per capita mean income across caste groups in Gujarat (INR) Annual per capita mean income across caste groups in Haryana (INR) Change in the number of graduates among caste groups from 2004/5 to 2011/12 Percentage of salaried among caste groups Percentage of cultivators among caste groups Relative Lorenz curves for per capita income of caste groups of Maharashtra Relative Lorenz curves for per capita income of caste groups of Gujarat Relative Lorenz curves for per capita income of caste groups of Haryana

5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9

10.1 Relative growth of Indian Army and paramilitary forces since Independence

28 29

140 140 141 146 146 147 149 149 150

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Figures and Tables

Tables 2.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5A.1 5A.2 5A.3

Features of situated knowledge Performance of SCs and OBCs to dominant castes Education attained (by caste) in Maharashtra Education completed (by caste) in Gujarat Education attained (by caste) in Haryana Income distribution by quintiles across caste groups in Maharashtra Income distribution by quintiles across caste groups in Gujarat Income distribution by quintiles across caste groups in Haryana

30 138 143 144 145 162 165 168

Abbreviations

ABVP AICTE API BJP BKS BKU BMS BSP CAG COAS CPI(M) DA-RT GERC GMO ECI IHDS INA JNU MAHYCO MGNREGA MHRD MLA

Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad All India Council for Technical Education academic performance indicators Bharatiya Janata Party Bharatiya Kisan Sangh Bharatiya Kisan Union Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh Bahujan Samaj Party Comptroller and Auditor General of India Chief of Army Staff Communist Party of India, Marxist Data Access and Research Transparency Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commission genetically modified organisms Election Commission of India India Human Development Survey Indian National Army Jawaharlal Nehru University Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act Ministry of Human Resource Development Member of Legislative Assembly

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Abbreviations

MPCE MSIL NAAC NCAER NCR NDA NET NGO NSSO NSS OBC OED OROP PTSD RBI RJD RSS SAD SC SIR SEZ UGC UNICEF

monthly per capita expenditures Maruti Suzuki India Limited National Academic Accreditation Council National Council of Applied Economic Research National Capital Region National Democratic Alliance National Entrance Test non-governmental organization National Sample Survey Office National Sample Survey on Employment and Unemployment other backward classes Oxford English Dictionary One Rank One Pension Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Reserve Bank of India Rashtriya Janata Dal Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Shiromani Akali Dal Scheduled Castes special investment regions special economic zones University Grants Commission United Nations Children Fund

Acknowledgements

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his volume would not have been possible without the generosity of its contributors, each of whom we sincerely thank with deep appreciation. The idea of a volume analysing Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph’s intellectual impact was first discussed at a September 2016 panel at the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Philadelphia, entitled ‘New Ways to Think about Comparative Politics: The Rudolphs’ Intellectual Legacy’. We convey our earnest affection and gratitude to Kristen Monroe, who brought us together for the panel and encouraged us to collaborate. Two months later, we met again in the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago where we spoke at the Rudolphs’ memorial hosted by the university. The gothic aura of the chapel was filled that November day with the bonhomie of colleagues, students, and friends—bringing people together as only the Rudolphs could. In February of 2018, John Echeverri-Gent organized a conference titled ‘The Interpretative Approaches to Political Economy: Political Science, India and the Rudolph Legacy’ at the University of Virginia. The papers presented there served as working drafts for the chapters in this volume. It was generously sponsored by the university’s Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, Institute of the Humanities and Global Culture, Colloquy on Culture and Democracy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, Office of the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and the Taraknath Das Foundation. The individual chapter contributions benefited from critical feedback by the conference discussants. A very special thanks to Rob Jenkins

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(Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York), Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner (University of Virginia), Aseema Sinha (Claremont McKenna College), Emmanuel Teitelbaum (George Washington University), and Denise Walsh (University of Virginia) for their important interventions and encouragement. Rakhahari Chatterjee, Elisavinda Echeverri-Gent, Mujibur Rehman, Milan Vaishnav, and Denise Walsh read the later versions of some chapters and generously provided insightful suggestions. We are also deeply grateful to Ralph and Marta Nicholas for their feedback and generous sharing of ideas. A special thanks to our conference rapporteur Mathew D. Frierdich who capably transcribed the conference proceedings and whose editorial assistance was immensely helpful. We are also grateful to Tim Crump for his excellent research assistance. Our deepest gratitude goes to Frank Hoeber for contributing the Foreword and reminding us of the Rudolphs’ humanist perspective towards life and the academic discipline. Our greatest thanks to Oxford University Press and its team of editors for their support. Moutushi Mukherjee and Aditi Saxena worked untiringly with us to shepherd this manuscript to publication; we can’t thank them enough. Lastly, our most sincere gratitude goes to our families for their unconditional love and, above all, their patience.

Foreword: Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph Partners in Political Science and Indian Studies

francis w. hoeber

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usanne Hoeber and Lloyd Rudolph met at Harvard University in 1950; they got married in 1952. When they took their second research trip to India in 1962–3, they were 32 and 35, respectively. Shortly after their arrival, they asked with intrepid directness to interview Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. They were only slightly surprised when their request was granted. The invitation, in an oversized parchment envelope and typed on impressive stationery, was hand-delivered by a uniformed messenger in an elegant car to the Rudolphs’ house at 44 Lucknow Road in Old Delhi. The interview was scheduled for Tuesday, 13 February 1963. Susanne and Lloyd devised a singular scheme for making the most of their time with Nehru: they decided they would take no notes, so neither he nor they would be distracted by their writing. They prepared for days. They read articles and newspapers and drafted a set of questions for the prime minister. These they revised again and again to make them clear and direct, with the intention of being both respectful and provocative. Lloyd said later that the key was to start with a complicated and difficult question, so Nehru would know they were knowledgeable and would not be put off with conventional generalities. When they were finally satisfied with the questions they had formulated, they memorized them. They were determined to interview Nehru in the absence of any paper or writing instrument.

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On the appointed day, the Rudolphs drove their little green Fiat to the imposing Prime Minister’s Secretariat in New Delhi. There they were ushered into Nehru’s private office where they interviewed him intensely for more than an hour. He was cordial and frank, though guarded on certain issues as Susanne and Lloyd had anticipated. In an amusing aside, Susanne took out a cigarette at one point (everyone smoked then, including Nehru) and Lloyd and the prime minister both lit a match for her at the same time. Susanne smiled at Lloyd but turned and accepted a light from the handsome Nehru. Heading home, Susanne and Lloyd talked rapidly; he drove as she furiously scribbled notes of what the prime minister had told them. As soon as they returned to the house on Lucknow Road, they hastened to their study and closed the door. With the prepared list of questions before them as a guide, they spoke into the microphone of their little tape recorder and dictated Nehru’s responses. Each reminded the other of what they had heard, using their collective memory to recall and record the prime minister’s words precisely. Sometimes during the dictation, one of them would start a sentence and the other would finish it, a rhetorical characteristic that would become one of their habits when working together. They turned the dictation tape over to their secretary to transcribe, and later edited the typed transcript before having it retyped into a final version with an original and five carbon copies. There were no copy machines, let alone personal computers, in India in 1963. The transcribed interview came to a dozen legal-size pages. The candid responses the Rudolphs elicited from Nehru were a testament to their methodological inventiveness and unique teamwork. Susanne and Lloyd used the information they gleaned from Nehru in numerous articles and books over the ensuing years, and made the transcript available to other scholars. It is available online today and continues to be cited in historical studies.1 The point of this story is to illustrate the characteristics that formed the underpinning of the Rudolphs’ vital research, writing, and teaching: a remarkable, almost reckless, intrepidity in approaching people and ideas; ingenious but carefully thought out methodologies; endless investigation, contemplation, analysis, and preparation of their materials; and intellectual teamwork, in which the strengths of one supported the strengths of the other in a rare, seamless partnership of two minds.2

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I know this Nehru story because in 1962–3 I took a year off as an undergraduate at Columbia University to work as Susanne and Lloyd’s research assistant in India. I was the secretary who typed the drafts of the questions and the notes of the interview. *** Lloyd Irving Rudolph was born in Elgin, Illinois, USA, on 1 November 1927. His father died when he was quite young, leaving his dynamic mother, Bertha Rudolph, to run the family shoe factory and care for three young sons. When Bertha went to work, much of Lloyd’s upbringing became the province of Wiliamina Carstairs, a Scottish nanny/ governess hired by Bertha. Ms Carstairs (‘Nana’) conveyed to Lloyd and his brothers an understated Anglophilic personal style and sophistication, along with an appreciation for discipline and hard work, that continued to influence Lloyd throughout his life. After graduating from high school in 1944, Lloyd was appointed a cadet at West Point, but resigned his appointment after a semester when it became clear that World War  II would end before he graduated from the academy. He enrolled at Harvard University, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1948. From Harvard he also earned a master’s degree in public administration in 1950 and a PhD in political science in 1956. His dissertation was titled ‘The Meaning of Party: From the Politics of Status to the Politics of Opinion in Eighteenth Century England and America’, indicating his interest in parties, political structures, and state formation—all issues that would keep the Rudolphs occupied later. Lloyd always had a particular interest in political history and its effect on institutional developments over time. It is clear, however, that Susanne was the first of the two to develop an interest in India and that Lloyd followed her into that area of specialization. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph was born in Mannheim, Germany, on 3 April 1930. She was the daughter of educated social democratic activists Johannes U. Höber and Elfriede Fischer Höber, who fled Hitler’s Germany out of political conviction just before World War II. Susanne was nine years old when she came to the United States of America.3 Americanizing their name, the Hoebers settled in Philadelphia, where Susanne’s parents quickly became active in progressive and reform politics and the management of non-governmental organizations

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concerned with public policy issues. Although Susanne entered elementary school speaking no English, by the time she finished high school in 1947 she was valedictorian. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College summa cum laude in 1951 and earned her PhD from Harvard University in 1955. Her dissertation was titled ‘Congress in Power: A Study of Party in the Context of Asian Democracy’. Susanne would later downplay her thesis somewhat, saying that it wasn’t her best work. Nevertheless, writing about the new democracy just a few years after India’s Independence was then a relatively new area of comparative politics. The early influences on the Rudolphs’ intellectual development included their parents, especially Susanne’s. Johannes Höber and Elfriede Fischer met while pursuing their doctorates in political economics (Volkswirtschaft) at the University of Heidelberg in the 1920s. The linkage of economics and politics, which the Rudolphs’ work often explores, parallels Susanne’s parents’ academic grounding. The Hoeber family embraced a strong faith in democratic institutions and the ability of sound governments to address human and social needs. Their loyalty to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was only strengthened after the Allies’ defeat of Fascism in World War II. Lloyd’s family, as well as Susanne’s, took support of Roosevelt’s policies as a given. In 1948, however, while in college, Susanne campaigned for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace for president of the United States of America, somewhat discomfiting her parents who supported Roosevelt’s vice president, Democrat Harry S. Truman. Both Lloyd and Susanne grew up with strong, effective women role models. Lloyd’s mother was an able factory manager, working outside the home as a female business executive at a time when the concept of woman-as-housewife was ascendant in America. Susanne’s mother, Elfriede, also worked outside the home using her economist’s training to write policy papers for the Philadelphia Housing Association, a non-profit advocacy group. Thus, Susanne and Lloyd both grew up taking it for granted that women and men could have equal roles in the workplace, making their egalitarian intellectual partnership perfectly natural. Susanne had another female role model—her grandmother on her father’s side. Susanne’s grandfather, Rudolf Höber, was a prominent professor of physiology, first at the University of Kiel and after 1934 at

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the University of Pennsylvania. Importantly, he was a strong feminist, supervising the dissertations of dozens of women and supporting his wife, Josephine, in becoming a medical doctor. Josephine eventually became Rudolf’s partner in laboratory research. In an interesting parallel to the Rudolphs, Rudolf Höber and Josephine Höber published their laboratory findings in jointly written articles in scientific journals in the 1920s and 1930s, setting a model for Susanne and Lloyd’s coauthorship two generations later.4 After Lloyd and Susanne married, Johannes and Elfriede both became readers and frequent sounding boards for the Rudolphs’ ongoing writing. At Harvard University in the 1950s, where Susanne and Lloyd met, got their doctorates, and began teaching, powerful intellectuals inculcated the approach to independent, non-conventional, crossdisciplinary thinking that characterized the Rudolphs’ multifaceted engagement with India.5 In more than one of their publications they looked back and examined their own intellectual development, as in the introduction to their penultimate book, Destination India. At Harvard, where we did our PhDs in political science (Susanne 1955; Lloyd 1956) we studied comparative politics and nationalism with Samuel Beer, Rupert Emerson, and Carl Friedrich.6 We learned to analyze institutions, politics, and, even then, policy, as they were defined by European and American historical experience. … Our openness to area and language knowledge was partly a consequence of working while junior faculty at Harvard with David Riesman in his course on American character and social structure and with Erik Erikson in his course and seminar on life history and identity formation. These experiences prepared us intellectually and emotionally better than did our graduate education in political science to respond to living in and learning from India. They liberated us from the disciplinary straitjacket of political science and opened the way for us to be humanistic social scientists more concerned with meaning than with causation. (Rudolph and Rudolph 2014, xii)7

The Rudolphs acknowledged these early influences again in the threevolume collection of their essays published by Oxford University Press in 2008: Our teachers and, subsequently, colleagues at Harvard, Carl Friedrich, Samuel Beer, and Louis Hartz, used theory to frame and analyse historical and empirical questions. We also learned from David Riesman and

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Erik Erikson that theory, social and psychological as well as political, helped to identify and answer questions. By 1964, when we left Harvard for the University of Chicago, we often found that Max Weber’s ideal typical mode of theorizing was a good starting point for research and analysis. At the University of Chicago, theory mattered in the intense discussions of the Committee on the Comparative Study of New Nations. (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008a, 139)

The Rudolphs’ connections with many of these early influences occurred in the rich environment of Harvard’s ‘house’ system, particularly at Dunster House. The undergraduate houses, each providing residences and meals for a few hundred students, are characterized by close interactions between undergraduates, graduate resident ‘tutors’, and resident and non-resident faculty. For Lloyd and Susanne, this meant living in an intellectual community where academic conversation and the cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas were a natural part of everyday life. Lloyd and Susanne were residing in Dunster House at a point at which, according to Stanley N. Katz, the houses were functioning at their high point in the post-war period. That was because the resident tutors were, on the whole, war veterans—older, more mature, and unmarried. The result was a lively Senior Common Room and easy faculty–student relations. When Lloyd was appointed the first married senior tutor of Dunster House in 1960, he and Susanne presided over an unusual salon. This Harvard tradition of socializing between students and faculty and among faculty meant that each of them was able to make connections with major thinkers in a variety of fields, not just political science. From Americanist Louis Hartz, Lloyd’s PhD thesis advisor, the Rudolphs took an affirmative view of American governance as supported by a consensus faith in classical liberalism (Hartz 1955). From political philosopher Carl Friedrich, the Rudolphs gained a grounding in constitutional democracy. Friedrich believed strongly in the rule of law, arguing that it was only through a carefully designed system of legal protections that a democracy could choose its leaders, perform the public’s business in an orderly manner, and prevent either the citizenry or public office holders from excesses. Friedrich’s views were also reflected in the Rudolphs’ long-time concern with layered political structures and strong non-governmental institutions as protection against centralization and excess state power. From sociologist David

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Riesman (1954), the Rudolphs came to think about politics in the context of individual and group social dynamics, sensitizing them, in the early years of their engagement with India, to observe how social structures affected political decisions, influencing their penetrating observations in the groundbreaking The Modernity of Tradition (1967). From psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, the Rudolphs derived an interest in the psychosocial development of political leaders, reflected particularly in their long-time interest in the personality and leadership style of Gandhi.8 Susanne and Lloyd’s marriage launched an exceptional personal and professional partnership that endured for more than six decades. Because they wrote and published together and often taught and lectured together, they were mostly referred to in a single collective noun: ‘The Rudolphs’. Aside from their academic work, the Rudolphs were revered for their hospitality, which epitomized their thoughtful, caring approach to their students, colleagues, research subjects, and friends. They regularly hosted interesting guests over generous meals that ranged from a quiet, elegant French dinner for four at their large, old Chicago house, to parties for more than a hundred, featuring fine Indian cooking or a traditional New England country supper on the lawn of their Vermont summer home. Moreover, the Rudolphs were open to conversations with students and colleagues about everything they were doing. They showed endless interest in the research, writing, and analysis that their students and others were carrying out. Lloyd would respond to almost any conversation with a list of several books he had recently read that might relate to some topic under discussion. At any visit to their home one was likely to encounter not just academics but also journalists, politicians, and other public figures from India, USA, as well as other countries. In Vermont, one was also apt to encounter the local postmaster or farmers who were neighbours and friends. At one Barnard gathering visitors could observe an intense conversation going on between Evatte Hull, a dairy farmer’s wife, and Harvard economist and former ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith. A remarkable characteristic of the many tributes published after the Rudolphs died was the number of individuals who felt they had a ‘special’ relationship with the Rudolphs that no one else shared. Prominent individuals in academia and politics from around the world remarked on how the Rudolphs had opened new worlds of study and ideas to them. Between

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them, they supervised some 300 doctoral dissertations, but they were admired for how they lived as well as for how they thought, wrote, and taught. They were seen as brilliant and scintillating scholars and teachers but also as engaged, warm, and compassionate friends. Among their other contributions, the Rudolphs showed many young women how it was possible to combine a vigorous career with a rich family life. Susanne insisted that she never felt oppressed by ‘the patriarchy’, and given her stellar career she did not see herself as a victim of sexism. Still, she had to live through some awkward social and professional situations. It is difficult to remember how women were regarded at places such as Harvard at the beginning of the Rudolphs’ career. Women were excluded from the Faculty Club, a custom Susanne did not dispute until the day David Riesman invited her to lunch there. A functionary at the door reminded Professor Riesman of the exclusionary rule, to which he responded by ignoring the doorman and walking in with Susanne and sitting down to a meal. The rule was never observed thereafter. But when Susanne told a senior faculty member in 1961 that she was pregnant, he looked at her with shocked amazement and said, ‘Really? And here I always thought of you as an intellectual!’ With the help of a succession of live-in au pairs, Susanne and Lloyd managed to raise three charming and accomplished children while maintaining hyperactive schedules as academics. During summers the whole family would repair to the house on Silver Lake in Barnard. On weekdays there, Susanne and Lloyd would spend their days closeted to write, but the whole family gathered together for meals. One summer, to assure they could concentrate, Lloyd and Susanne set up their office in a vacated chicken coop they rented from a farmer’s widow half a mile from the house, but they always walked back to be with their children for lunch and dinner. The Rudolphs rejoined the Harvard faculty upon their return from their first trip to India in 1957. They remained there until 1964, when they were appointed to the University of Chicago political science faculty. Harvard’s repeated delays in establishing a promised South Asia programme eased the Rudolphs’ decision to leave Cambridge. They bought a huge house at 4943 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, ample for their growing family and their active social life; Muhammad Ali was their neighbour across the street. In 1964 it was even more unusual than it would be today for a husband and wife both to be

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appointed to tenure track positions at the same university, in the same field, at the same time. Susanne, however, was initially assigned to the college and was not permitted to teach graduate students until she was admitted to the graduate faculty in the 1970s. The Rudolphs taught many classes jointly. The University of Chicago had been a centre for Indian and Asian studies well before the Rudolphs got there, and the founding in 1955 of the Committee on South Asian Studies (COSAS) coordinated studies of Indian languages, history, religions, economics, and politics across faculties in the university. A cross-disciplinary course on ‘Indian Civilization’ was established there in 1956, and Susanne became involved in the redesign of this curriculum shortly after her arrival at Chicago (Davis 1985). During her time at Chicago, Susanne held a wide array of positions in addition to her teaching, including master of the Social Science Collegiate Division, associate dean of the college, director of the South Asian Language and Area Center (a programme within COSAS), and the first woman chair of the Political Science Department. She was approached several times about becoming president of distinguished colleges and universities, but on each occasion she demurred, preferring teaching and research to administration. She held positions on the Social Science Research Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Board of Trustees of Sarah Lawrence College. Susanne became the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the university. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. In recognition of her dedication to her students, she was winner of the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. At the University of Chicago, Lloyd served as chair of the Committee on International Relations and the master of arts programme in the social sciences and as chair of concentrations in political science, public policy, international studies, and South Asian studies in the college. In 1999 Lloyd received the university’s faculty award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. He was also active on committees of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Asia Society, and the Association for Asian Studies. In 1985, Susanne was elected vice president of the 7,000-member Association for Asian Studies, succeeding automatically to the office of

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president in 1986. Her presidential address, delivered on 10 April 1987, was titled ‘State Formation in Asia: Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study’ (Rudolph 1987b, 731–46). Here, Susanne encapsulated the Rudolphs’ methodological perspective on comparative and area studies within the field of political science: ‘I want to make a case for comparison that starts from below, when scholars study particular problems in particular areas and work their way up to generalization, rather than a comparison that drops a deductive scheme from above down on the evidence. That kind of dropping not infrequently results in crushed data’ (Rudolph 1987b, 731). She also argued for understanding cultures in terms other than merely the empiricist models of Western scholars: ‘We must try to create theoretical frameworks that combine a demystified, rationalist worldview with an understanding of the phenomenology of the symbolic in societies where the gods have not yet died’ (Rudolph 1987b, 742). These declarations foreshadowed positions she and Lloyd took 15 years later when the political science profession in the USA was shaken by vigorous disputes over methodologic diversity, ‘rational choice’, area studies, and the governance of the profession. The Rudolphs were active in the ‘Perestroika’ movement within the political science field, a loose-knit grassroots effort in the early 2000s that sought both to open political science to greater methodological pluralism and to bring broader participation to the governance of the APSA.9 The movement was initiated through a critical anonymous letter in the fall of 2000 that elicited a prolonged debate about reforms seen as needed in the APSA. As area specialists, the Rudolphs had long understood politics from a position of situated knowledge, seeing things from the particular perspective of people’s lived experience and not from abstract and supposedly universal principles. Indeed, recognizing and understanding particular perspectives was a foundational principle of their earliest experience in India over 40 years previously. They had spent a summer before their first trip to India studying survey research methods (including machine-sorting of stacks of computer punch cards, cutting edge technology in 1956), only to discover that such methods didn’t work in the environment of a village in Madras state.10 A small but decisive contribution by the Rudolphs to the Perestroika debates was the simple step of reserving a room for an evening reception titled ‘Perestroika’ at the APSA meeting in San Francisco at the end of August 2001. An astonishing number of

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interested individuals abandoned other gatherings and mobbed the reception, taking the movement from a primarily online phenomenon to a collection of individuals discussing epistemological and methodological issues face to face. At the same conference, Susanne presented a paper entitled ‘Perestroika and Its Other’, in which she argued, in the firm but polite style of which she was a master, that ‘a comprehensive political science will be a self-conscious discipline, a discipline that recognizes and accepts the role difference plays in scholarship but whose reflexivity helps its differently situated members to see common ground’ (Monroe 2005, 12–20). Lloyd delivered his own paper at the same panel. Ever one for unconventional titles, Lloyd’s encapsulated his argument: ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend: Arguments for Pluralism and against Monopoly in Political Science’ (Monroe 2005, 230–6). Partly as a result of the Rudolphs’ activism in Perestroika, Susanne was elected president of the 13,000-member APSA in 2003. She appears to have been the only person to serve as president of both the Association for Asian Studies and the APSA, recognizing the breadth of her intellectual achievements. In her role as president of APSA, she attempted to vitalize membership activism by creating direct elections for certain positions and commissioned a report on ‘Difference and Equality in Developing Societies’. The Rudolphs first travelled to India in 1956 in an adventurous journey, driving overland from Germany to Delhi in a Land Rover. That adventure was recounted in one of their last books, Destination India, mentioned previously. On this first visit to India, they spent several months in Jaipur and the surrounding area, developing an interest in and love for Rajasthan that would bring them back frequently. After this 1956–7 research year, they returned to India every third or fourth year, bringing their three children with them, so they grew up learning Hindi and experiencing India as a second home. With their peripatetic lives, the Rudolphs became accustomed to moving their ‘home’ frequently. In the course of their married life, they had permanent residences in Cambridge, Chicago (two different homes), Berkeley, and Oakland, in addition to their summer home in Vermont. One of their years in India would be preceded by shipping an astonishing quantity of work and study materials—including, often, 50 parcels of books for reference. When their children travelled

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with them, the Rudolphs had to plan which clothes, books, and other objects would be important for their comfort. When they were young, the children attended schools in Jaipur, such as the Maharani Gayatri Devi School; when they were older, they boarded at the Woodstock School in Mussoori. The return trips from India involved even more baggage, shipping new books and periodicals as well as art and artifacts. In 1962–3 when I was with the Rudolphs in Delhi, a large trunk was required just for the articles that Lloyd had clipped from the five newspapers and a dozen periodicals to which he subscribed during the year. Susanne had an amazing capacity to create a home for the family in short order, wherever they went. She packed a set of small tablecloths in her suitcase, so when they settled in a new house she could cover unsightly furniture and create a familiar environment in short order. In Jaipur or other places they lived in India, the Rudolphs maintained the same kind of rich social life that merged with their professional relationships as they had in Chicago and Vermont. Although they received visitors from Europe and the United States of America, most of their social contacts were Indians. After their retirement from active teaching in 2002, the Rudolphs returned to Jaipur each winter for several months of continued research and writing and to renew connections with Indian officials, scholars, and friends. On 31 March 2014, on their last trip to India, the Rudolphs were presented the Padma Bhushan award, one of India’s highest civilian honours, by President Pranab Mukherjee. The award recognizes distinguished service of a high order to the nation of India; its presentation to non-Indians is a rare honour. Both Susanne and Lloyd suffered health problems in their later life. Susanne was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the late 1990s, but for years only a few of her colleagues were aware of it as she continued to push on vigorously despite the disease. Lloyd contracted prostate cancer a few years later. Although treatment brought temporary remission, the disease returned and caused him to grow weaker. Somehow, the two of them succeeded in ignoring much of their decline, continuing to read, write, discuss, and engage colleagues, friends, and relatives. Their last trip to India, to receive the Padma Bushan, was something of an ordeal because of their poor health, but it was an event they could not miss. The difficult trip was especially rewarding because the University of Chicago simultaneously inaugurated its new centre

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in Delhi, which had long been a dream of the Rudolphs. They must have deeply appreciated the standing ovation they received from the distinguished Indian and American scholars and officials at the close of the inaugural ceremonies. Susanne and Lloyd loved one another deeply. Indeed, it is my belief that they lived as long as they did in the face of debilitating illness because each wanted to care for the other and neither could bear passing away and leaving the other alone. My last visit with the Rudolphs was at their home in Oakland, California, a month before Susanne’s death. Susanne roused herself up in her hospital bed and insisted on reviewing a paper I had prepared for an academic conference. In her weakened voice she offered me a constructive critique on how best to present the paper, with Lloyd interjecting pointed observations. They remained critical thinkers and—above all—teachers until the very end. Susanne and Lloyd’s health continued to decline over the next few weeks and then they were gone. Susanne died on 23 December 2015 and Lloyd just 24 days later, on 16 January 2016. No one who knew them could imagine one surviving for long without the other. The Rudolphs, between them, published more than 20 books and dozens of articles. They co-authored or co-edited eight books jointly, starting with The Modernity of Tradition, a seminal formulation of the problem of tradition and modernity that shaped the study of India past and present over the next 50 years. It turned out to be one of the most enduring interpretations of modernization not just of Indian society but of non-Western nations around the world. At a time when reigning theories of the 1950s blamed the ‘backwardness’ of India on the tenacity of her ‘traditional’ institutions such as caste, the Rudolphs showed how traditional-seeming institutions had actually changed through the colonial period to take on functions similar to political parties that one could only see as ‘modern’. Their later work on Indian capitalism, Gandhi, and other topics were similarly informed by a deep sensitivity to India’s specific history and culture. Their other books include Education and Politics in India (co-editors; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972); The Regional Imperative: The Administration of U.S. Foreign Policy Towards South Asian States (co-editors and contributing authors; New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1980, 2007); Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political

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Economy of the Indian State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Pres, 2006). In 2008, the Oxford University Press published a threevolume, career-spanning collection of the Rudolphs’ writings entitled Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective 1956–2006. From the beginning, the Rudolphs had a particular interest in Rajasthan’s history and politics and were keen observers of its changing role in the Indian constellation from its singular position under British imperial rule to the controversies of the present day. They lived in Jaipur during many of the years they were in India for research. Indeed, I have heard that one or two critics suggested that their attachment to Rajasthan and their social connections with former princely families of Jaipur may have skewed their perspectives on some issues. In any event, their Essays on Rajputana (1984), incorporating essays written over 20 years, treated issues of history, politics, ethnography, and sociology in this part of India. In 1970, the Rudolphs learned of the existence of the 44-year diary of Thakur Amar Singh of Kanota, a Rajput nobleman who interacted with the British colonial regime over much of his life. Between 1898, when he was 18, until his death in 1942, Amar Singh daily wrote extensive accounts of his life and times. The diary, bound in 87 folio-size volumes of about 800 pages each, resides these days in Kanota Fort in Rajasthan. Amar Singh and his 70,000-page diary would live with Susanne and Lloyd for the next 30 years, until they were finally able to publish their analysis of the diarist’s observations in Reversing the Gaze: The Amar Singh Diary, a Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000; New York: Westview Press, 2002). The topic of nineteenth-century British colonial historian James Tod was of interest to the Rudolphs from their earliest engagement with India. Shortly after their return from India in 1957, they discovered a first edition of Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan on the dusty shelves of an antiquarian bookshop in Philadelphia. They were unable to afford it themselves, but Susanne’s parents made them a gift of it, the two volumes rebound in bright buckram to replace the crumbled original leather binding. When the Rudolphs died nearly 60 years later, the two volumes—the bindings now faded and worn to dull beige— still occupied a prominent place in their living room. The printed pages remain bright and clear and the magnificent illustrations look

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as though they were printed yesterday. The book provided the foundation for their last book, published posthumously, Romanticism’s Child: An Intellectual History of James Tod’s Influence on Indian History and Historiography (2016). The Rudolphs loved their work. Susanne once told me that she was never so happy as when she was in front of a typewriter or, later, a computer screen composing elegant sentences to convey complex thoughts clearly. Did the Rudolphs ever disagree? I am aware of only one area of conflict: footnotes. Lloyd would introduce lengthy notes on tangential issues into their manuscripts. Susanne would remove these disquisitions when she reviewed Lloyd’s drafts, and he would promptly put them back in. *** Numerous memorial events convened after the Rudolphs’ deaths attested to the esteem in which they were held and their importance to Indian scholarship and the field of political science. There were memorials in Oakland, California; New Delhi; at the 2016 APSA meeting in Philadelphia; and a convocation in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago. In June 2016 dozens of Susanne and Lloyd’s family, friends, students, and colleagues gathered in the village of Barnard, Vermont, where the Rudolphs had their lovely house on Silver Lake in which they spent summers writing and vacationing for over 50 years. On a brilliant sunny afternoon, their friends interred their ashes side by side in a single plot in the village cemetery, as Susanne and Lloyd had wished. The inscription on the gravestone, which they composed themselves, reads: SUSANNE HOEBER RUDOLPH, 1930–2015 - LLOYD I RUDOLPH, 1927–2016 AT HOME IN BARNARD, JAIPUR AND CHICAGO INDIA SCHOLARS - CARING PARENTS - LOVERS OF SILVER LAKE.

Endnotes 1. The Rudolphs’ papers and their collection of books on Indian subjects are deposited in the Southern Asia Collections of the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library.

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2. The Rudolphs’ intellectual, professional, and personal relationship has been likened to those of sociologists Max and Marianne Weber and economists Beatrice and Sidney Webb. 3. Johannes and Elfriede Hoeber’s flight from Germany with Susanne is recounted in Francis W. Hoeber (2015). 4. See, for example, Rudolf Höber and Josephine Höber (1942). In some ways, the Rudolphs’ approach to study and teaching reincarnated the spirit of Susanne’s grandfather. A memorial essay by a former student of Rudolf Höber’s included this: He was enabled to achieve [a] new direction in natural science through an exceptional gift to take things in and then convey them to others, both in speaking and in writing. The clarity of his thought processes and of his speech worked in concert with his easy enthusiasm and personal charm. The first lecture I heard him give when I was a young student remains for me an unforgettable memory. I can still see before me the small, lively man with his clever, sparkling eyes and his generous smile, pacing up and down behind the demonstration desk in the lecture hall and talking about his work at the Naples [Zoological] Station, from whence he had recently returned. His first words to the new students were not about the organization of matter or the significance of physiology for medicine, but about the beauty of biology and its problems and of the work on its questions. The warmth and enthusiasm of this introduction won over the entire auditorium, even before the first word was spoken about physiology. (Wilbrandt 1957; translation by author) 5. Prof. Stanley N. Katz of Princeton University and David L. Maxey, Esq. of Philadelphia, two of the Rudolphs’ oldest and closest friends and colleagues, provided valuable reflections on the intellectual atmosphere at Harvard in this period. 6. At Heidelberg University, Carl Friedrich was a contemporary of Susanne’s parents. His dissertation supervisor at Heidelberg University was Alfred Weber, who also supervised Susanne’s mother’s dissertation. Alfred Weber was the brother of Max Weber, whose thinking is cited frequently in the Rudolphs’ work. Friedrich’s essay about his experience as an exchange student in the United States of America was included in a book of essays edited by Susanne’s mother when she was director of the Heidelberg student exchange programme [Akademischer Austauschdienst] (Höber and Goverts 1930, 170–82). 7. The commitment to multi-disciplinary approaches and humanistic methodologies is expanded in Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (2005, 5–14). 8. See Erik H. Erikson (1958, 1969); Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph (1983, 2006).

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9. Kristen Renwick Monroe (2005). See also ‘Modes of Inquiry’ in Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘Writing India’, India Review 7, no. 4 (October–December 2008): 270–4, and four related articles cited therein. More than once, the Rudolphs were asked if one or both of them were the anonymous ‘Mr Perestroika’ whose open letter launched the movement; they were not. 10. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, ‘Surveys in India: Field Experience in Madras State’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 22, no. 3 (1958): 235–44, reprinted in Rudolph and Rudolph (2008a).

References Davis, Richard H. 1985. South Asia at Chicago: A History. Chicago: Committee on Southern Asia Studies, University of Chicago. Erikson, Erik H. 1958. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. ———. 1969. Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Hartz, Louis. 1955. The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt Brace. Hoeber, Francis W. 2015. Against Time: Letters from Nazi Germany, 1938–1939. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Press. Höber, Elfriede Fischer, and Henry Goverts, eds. 1930. Der Student im Ausland, Heidelberger Berichte zum Universitätsleben der Gegenwart [Students abroad: Heidelberg accounts of present-day university life]. Heidelberg: Bei J. Horning. Höber, Rudolf, and Josephine Höber. 1942. ‘The Influence of Detergents on Some Physiological Phenomena, Especially on the Stellate Cells of the Frog Liver’. Journal of General Physiology 25 (5) (20 May): 705–15. Monroe, Kristen Renwick, ed. 2005. Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riesman, David. 1954. Individualism Reconsidered, and Other Essays. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 2008a. The Realm of Ideas. Vol. I of Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty Year Perspective, 1956–2006. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008b. The Realm of Institutions. Vol. II of Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty Year Perspective, 1956–2006. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008c. The Realm of the Public Sphere. Vol. III of Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty Year Perspective, 1956–2006. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Destination India: From London Overland to India and What We Learned There. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 1987. ‘Presidential Address: State Formation in Asia-Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study’. The Journal of Asian Studies 46 (4): 731–46. ———. 2005. ‘The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World’. Perspectives in Politics 3 (1): 5–14. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, and Lloyd I. Rudolph, eds. 1972. Education and Politics in India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———, eds. 1980. The Regional Imperative: The Administration of U.S. Foreign Policy Towards South Asian States. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. ———. 1983. Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1984. Essays on Rajputana. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. ———. 1987a. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2016. Romanticism’s Child: An Intellectual History of James Tod’s Influence on Indian History and Historiography. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, Lloyd I. Rudolph, and Mohan Singh Kanota. 2002. Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary: A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Wilbrandt, Walter. 1957. ‘Rudolf Höber’. Ergebnisse der Physiologie. Biologischen Chemie und Experimentellen Pharmakologie. Volume 49. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

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hy do members of different religious communities live together peacefully for decades and then suddenly erupt into murderous conflict? How is it possible for a system of institutional inequality such as the caste system to serve as a vehicle of democratic participation ultimately leading to increased political and social equality? Why might an Indian peasant under some circumstances acquiesce to social oppression, in other circumstances attempt to alleviate it by engaging in political action as a member of a caste or religious group, or in yet other situations participate in class-based political action? This book is premised on the contention that answers to these and many other important questions can be illuminated by an interpretive approach to political analysis. Much of contemporary political analysis is characterized by formal modelling, sophisticated quantitative analysis, and historical approaches to the creation and change of political coalitions and institutions. This book draws on the seminal work of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph to demonstrate that interpretive approaches to politics deserve a seat at the analytical table. It builds on the Rudolphs’ scholarly corpus and the work of scholars inspired by it to elaborate many insights that can be gained by interpretivism while also exploring its limits. The Rudolphs’ interpretive analysis places the concept of ‘situated knowledge’ at the centre of their approach (Susanne Rudolph 2005a, John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Politics as Interpretation. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190125011.003.0001

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2005b). Situated knowledge refers to people’s distinctive understandings of the world and the way they are embedded in particular configurations of social relations, time, place, and culture. Situated knowledge plays a crucial role in the analysis of political action since people’s decisions on whether and how to act are contingent, according to the Rudolphs, on the process through which they use their distinctive understandings of the world to interpret the complex array of circumstances that comprise their social context. This interpretive process turns objective circumstances into subjective reasons that guide and motivate action. More specifically, the Rudolphs’ interpretive approach illuminates how an actor’s situated knowledge shapes her identity, normative justifications, and choice of strategies for political action and inaction. Situated knowledge also has implications for theory building. The  Rudolphs admonished scholars to avoid the ‘imperialism of categories’ that frequently results when top-down, deductive theories impose meaning on local actors (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967; Susanne Rudolph 2005a, 2005b). The deductive approach, they argued, distorts the distinctive understandings of actors and, therefore, often fails in explaining the social patterns of continuity and change. Because of their insistence on the importance of situated knowledge, the Rudolphs encouraged scholars to engage in theory building as a bottom-up process that begins with the local knowledge of actors and incorporates more abstract theoretical concepts only after accounting for complex contextual circumstances and distinctive local understandings. While the Rudolphs’ analysis draws from grand social theorists—for example, Weber, Marx, Habermas, and Foucault—their theoretical constructs integrate the insights of grand theory with the dynamism and complexity of local circumstance. In so doing, the situated knowledge approach promises a better appreciation of the multiple pathways to modernity and the pluralism of modernity itself. Placing situated knowledge at the centre of an interpretive approach to political analysis has implications for epistemology. Emphasis on the situated nature of knowledge leads to scepticism about attempts to understand the world through broad theoretical generalizations that do not acknowledge the impact of distinctive contexts which comprise the environment of people. Instead of sweeping theoretical laws, situated knowledge suggests that our understanding of the world is advanced by developing an appreciation for partial truths (Rudolph and Rudolph

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2006). Knowledge is pluralistic, and advancing our broader understanding involves appreciating distinctive ‘truths’ and comprehending how they coexist. The Rudolphs’ interpretive approach to political analysis prioritizes the human factor in politics. One way that knowledge is situated is that people, with all their complexity and ingenuity, engage with others in constructing social relations that shape politics. This humanist approach not only illuminates how discourse and customs shape actor strategies but also shows the consequences of human emotions in shaping political action. The Rudolphs’ interpretive scholarship was fundamentally humanist. The importance that their work gave to the humanity of actors underscored the importance of ethical approaches to political analysis. Their work challenged all political analysts to maintain these values. This volume assembles a group of distinguished scholars to provide a thought-provoking and rigorous engagement with the Rudolphs’ groundbreaking analysis as they relate to contemporary political issues. Each contributor addresses a seminal concept or analytical approach developed by the Rudolphs and then assesses its implications for their own cutting-edge research. The resulting chapters do not attempt to address all the normative and empirical questions that arise from the Rudolphs’ work and the broad topics and themes they covered. Instead, the chapters collectively demonstrate the theoretical and empirical power of the Rudolphs’ arguments in ways that advance political science analysis. In Part II, ‘Interpretative Approaches to Political Analysis’, EcheverriGent and Sadiq (Chapter 2) synthesize the insights of the volume’s contributors into an interpretive analytical framework that builds upon the Rudolphs’ seminal insights. The chapter starts by exploring the Weberian foundations of the Rudolphs’ interpretive analysis. Then, it elaborates the implications of the Rudolphs’ concept of ‘situated knowledge’ by depicting it as the meanings and motivations constructed by people embedded in a field structured by social relations, time, place, and culture (see Figure 2.2). The image is designed to illustrate how the actors’ construction of meaning and motivation is shaped by their lived experience in a rich and complex social context. Analysing how actors translate contextual circumstances into meaning and motivation is central to explaining how they choose strategies for action. Investigation

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of this interpretive process illuminates the importance of discourse and emotions in shaping the construction of meaning. Placing the actors’ construction of meaning at the centre of the process recognizes their scope for agency. It also gives political leadership a central role, since political leaders often provide frames and enact performances that shape the interpretive process. The introductory chapter elaborates the methodological implications of the interpretive approach, delineating the importance of interviewing and narrative analysis. Since interpretivists take the position that the knowledge claims of scholars are also a form of situated knowledge, they advocate a reflexive approach to scholarship that illuminates: (a) the impact of the positionality of the researcher and the researched, (b) the process of mutual, ongoing interpretation by the researched and the researcher during the research process, and (c) the importance of transparency in reporting how researchers generate their knowledge claims. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the implications of interpretative analysis for the broader field of political science. Vivien Schmidt (Chapter 3) and Kristen Monroe (Chapter 4) assess the Rudolphs’ contributions to interpretive analysis in the field of political science. The Rudolphs began their work as part of the area studies approach, and their analysis was profoundly affected by area studies, which they considered a ‘counter-movement’ in the field of political science. The Rudolphs quickly acquired an appreciation of the interpretative approach when they attempted to conduct survey research during their first trip to India in 1957 (Rudolph and Rudolph 1958). The disjuncture between the basic premises of their survey training and the social and political realities of their research site illuminated the importance of sensitivity to local knowledge, practice, and social organization. By the new millennium, the Rudolphs became leading members of the Perestroika movement, a movement in political science that sought to broaden the discipline by arguing for the importance of methodological pluralism including interpretive approaches (Monroe 2005). Vivien Schmidt (Chapter 3) begins by situating the Rudolphs’ development of the interpretative approach in the spirited debates about the epistemology and nature of social science inquiry from the 1950s through the 1970s. Schmidt then builds upon the Rudolphs’ approach to interpretive analysis to elaborate ‘discursive institutionalism’, a

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mode of analysis that theorizes the nature of discourse and how discursive exchange contributes to institutional change. Discursive institutionalism highlights the limits of explaining change by deductively imputing rational interests to actors. It shows how an actor’s interests and strategies for action emerge out of her discursive exchanges with other actors. These exchanges are structured by their ideational context. Ideas not only constitute the frames, norms, and narratives that shape the actors’ perceptions of the world; they also enable the actors to critically analyse and re-conceptualize the world in ways that promote change. Schmidt’s chapter advances beyond most discursive analyses by theorizing ‘ideational power’ or the capacity of actors to use ideas to influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs through persuasion, control of the meaning and normative value of ideas, as well as the capacity to structure discourse by controlling its agenda. Ultimately, Schmidt makes a cogent case for methodological pluralism in the study of ideas, one that can engage and even synthesize a range of analytical approaches. In Chapter 4, Kristen Monroe argues that social science analysis should go beyond institutional and behavioural analysis to explore ‘how perceptions of reality create human connections that serve as crucibles for social interaction’. Monroe begins by analysing the Rudolphs’ innovative use of political psychology in their study of identity, political leadership, and the consequences of perception for political action. Next, she draws inspiration from the Rudolphs’ work on Gandhi to develop the concept of ‘moral imagination’ or the capacity to empathize with other people’s lives in ways that recast moral issues and envision new solutions to moral problems. Monroe sees moral imagination as playing a crucial role in explaining forms of behaviour such as altruism and heroism amidst the terrifying circumstances of the Holocaust. Conversely, people’s capacity to dehumanize others is an important cause of terrorism and genocide. Monroe’s analysis underscores the importance of emotions in shaping peoples’ perceptions, moral choices, and political action. Elaborating the methodological implications of this humanist epistemology, Monroe emphasizes the utility of narrative interpretation for generating insights about the cognitive processes and human relations that are so critical to politics. She concludes by advocating that we should advance beyond mechanical models of ‘scientific’ explanation and develop a humanistic social

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science that leaves us open to surprises resulting from the innovatively creative behaviour of our fellow human beings. The chapters in Part III of the volume ‘Caste, Class, and the “Lived Experience” of Political Mobilization’ turn to the Rudolphs’ analysis of various social relationships and political mobilization in India. In the Rudolphs’ analysis, the complexity of Indian social organization provided multiple and contingent modes of political mobilization (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 1984, and 1967). The Rudolphs argued that India’s caste system was historically an oppressive system of social hierarchy, but in the context of the early years of post-colonial India, caste associations served as vehicles for political mobilization supporting democratization. Consistent with their view of situated knowledge, the Rudolphs developed the concept of ‘bullock capitalists’—showing how class took a distinctive form in rural India—to identify the leading social group in the ‘new agrarianism’ mobilization beginning in the 1970s. With this important exception, the Rudolphs’ analysis tended to focus on sectoral ‘demand groups’—trade unions and students, in addition to agrarian producers. In some work, they suggested that status groups based on caste or religion were the prevailing forms of social organization. The chapters in Part III advance the Rudolphs’ understanding that social organization and political mobilization in India were complex and contingent by demonstrating how political identity and mobilization result from a mutually determinative process of interaction between different status groups and social classes. Chapter 5 by Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan examines surprising changes in agrarian mobilization in the last decade. After decades of opposing affirmative action policies, dominant castes—including the Jats in Haryana, the Marathas in Maharashtra, and the Patels in Gujarat— mobilized to demand affirmative action for themselves. Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasn (2005a, 2005b) point out that this surprising turn of events is the result of a distinctive configuration of historical developments. The authors include extensive data to show that limited employment generation outside of agriculture, along with agricultural stagnation and decline in the average size of landholdings, has led to economic differentiation among the dominant castes. At the same time, reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Dalits have enabled the upper echelons of these groups to earn livelihoods that are frequently

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more desirable than those of the poorer members of the dominant castes. Members of the dominant classes have responded with castebased mobilization, demanding that they be reclassified as OBCs so that they can be eligible for public-sector reservations. This is a fascinating example of how co-determination of mobilization by class and caste has led to the paradoxical situation where dominant castes are demanding the extension of affirmative action to them. That this mobilization has occurred along caste lines speaks for the strength of affinal, kinship, and lineage networks in making caste a resilient vehicle for political mobilization. As economic differentiation progressively attenuates these linkages, Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan observe that it will be interesting to see whether mobilization along caste lines persists or whether rural political mobilization enters a new era. In Chapter 6, Agarwala and Herring argue for the impact of class on politics, even when it is not immediately visible. Building on the Rudolphs’ observation that collective action arises in local contexts, Agarwala and Herring point out the variations of class mobilization across India’s states. For instance, relations between the state and business are an important factor in Gujarat while popular class politics has had a more significant impact in West Bengal, Kerala, and the Maoist ‘red-belt’. Agarwala and Herring point out that the structural power of capital is no more visible than the suitcases of cash and under-the-table campaign contributions that businesses give in exchange for political favours, and it is not possible to explain the Indian state’s simultaneous rightist movement towards pro-business liberalism and the leftist move towards rights-based social welfare without reference to the forces of class. Agarwala and Herring make the important observation that our view of class politics is often skewed by a misleading preoccupation with the patterns of class politics that arose in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. They develop this point by analysing the rise of India’s informal workers and its agrarian producers. Even more than is the case in other late-industrializing countries, India’s economic development has transferred fewer workers from agriculture into industry and more workers into services. A large share of the workers in services—and an increasing portion of the workers in industry—are in the informal sector, lacking conventional legal protections. Agarwala and Herring document how, after decades of being excluded from the formal labour movement,

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self-employed workers, domestic workers, recycling and sanitation workers, and home-based garment workers have organized to gain legal recognition to secure new forms of labour protection. Similar to Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan, Agarwala and Herring note the decline, but not the demise, of India’s bullock capitalists. They show how cultural and class forces re-emerged during the new millennium to create a new basis for mobilization—the right to grow genetically engineered Bt cotton. Bullock capitalists rejuvenated their political clout by reviving the ‘Bharat versus India’ cultural frame—that technological innovation should benefit the rural as well as the urban sectors—and by mobilizing symbols such as satyagraha and the Nilkaneshwar temple on the sacred Narmada River in the process of enabling them to overcome efforts to restrict access to this new higher-yielding variety of cotton. Their efforts demonstrate how class can interact with local social organization and culture in a process of political mobilization that enables a group to succeed in winning concessions from the Indian state. Leela Fernandes, in Chapter 7, augments our understanding of the Rudolphs’ contributions to interpretive analysis by examining their distinctive approach to political economy. Fernandes points out that the Rudolphs’ analysis challenges the ‘homogenized, de-cultured language’ of conventional political economy to incorporate the unique as well as the general. Analytical concepts should not be accepted a priori. Nor should analysts attempt to merely render empirical contexts consistent with their analytical frameworks. On the contrary, the Rudolphs observe that social scientific analytical frameworks and local world views are ‘alien systems of meaning’ that should engage in a conversation that reformulates the analytical concepts. Fernandes goes on to explain that the Rudolphs utilized a constructivist approach to illuminate how class, the state, and culture have historically interacted to shape the way that people give meaning to their lives and ultimately fashion their political identity and behaviour. She agrees with Agarwala and Herring (Chapter 6) that the Rudolphs underestimate the importance of class in the Indian context. Nonetheless, she argues that they offer useful tools to understand the process of class formation. Building on the Rudolphs’ emphasis on the importance of incorporating how people construct meaning, Fernandes sees class as a dynamic product of the interaction between the state, social relations, and the language and

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culture that people use to make sense of their world. Drawing on her own work, Fernandes shows how the structural and discursive dimensions of class interact through the daily practice of resistance by women workers, the customs and rituals of religious festivals, and the community proceedings of organizations. Fernandes concludes her essay with a far-reaching critique of the anthropological and post-colonial turn of South Asian studies. She asserts, ‘If dominant political scientific approaches to political economy now too often miss the interpretive significance of cultural analysis, dominant approaches in area studies … miss the significance of structural analysis.’ Fernandes argues that we should reject this disciplinary dichotomy and synthesize insights from each mode of analysis in a process that, drawing from the Rudolphs, she describes as ‘creative liminality’. Part IV, ‘The State, Leadership, and Political Change’, explores some of the Rudolphs’ most seminal work in order to examine vital features of contemporary Indian politics. As elaborated in Chapter 2, the Rudolphs’ analytical perspective underscored the agency of political leadership to bring about institutional transformations (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 1967). Though they were insightful observers of the rise of Hindu nationalism, they never underestimated the potential of political leaders to lead India in illiberal directions. The Rudolphs were some of the earliest observers to realize the importance of higher education (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972). They were keen analysts of its politicization, but they held the hope that the state might intervene to protect the public interest. Their optimism seems misplaced in light of the state’s micromanagement of higher education and the threats the state has recently posed to freedom of speech at universities and colleges across the country. Finally, the Rudolphs’ (1964) classic essay on how India succeeded in maintaining civilian control over the military continues to offer valuable insights, but how far does their analysis go in explaining whether the Indian military will continue to remain outside of politics? Amrita Basu (Chapter 8) utilizes the Rudolphs’ analysis of Gandhi to develop a better understanding of Narendra Modi’s political leadership as well as charismatic leadership more generally. She notes that the Rudolphs identify key questions that are important to develop our understanding of Modi and virtually all political leaders. These questions include: What are the psychological and cultural dimensions of

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a political leader’s relationship to their supporters? How do performative actions construct public understandings of political leadership? How do leaders situate themselves in relation to the past, present, and future? Basu observes that both Gandhi and Modi possess profound psychological insights into the ethos of their respective eras. Both used strategic reinterpretation of religion to craft scripts that speak to people’s emotions and daily experience in order to establish a powerful, charismatic bond with them. Despite these similarities, Basu shows that Gandhi and Modi exhibit profound differences. For Gandhi, change began with the individual. Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) devalue the individual and emphasize the community. Gandhi was open about his personal weaknesses and built a popular following by calling on the public to join his efforts at selfimprovement. Modi, in contrast, employs high-powered advertising firms to craft an image of extraordinary virtue in order to attract legions of awed devotees. Gandhi used an eclectic view of religion to appeal to all religious communities. Modi employs a narrow understanding of Hinduism in order to appeal exclusively to Hindus. Gandhi was an advocate of a vibrant civil society and political dissent, whereas Modi is wary of autonomous civil society and curbs dissent by labelling it anti-national. While Gandhi deeply opposed strong, centralized state institutions, Modi has concentrated power in the central government’s executive while curtailing institutional checks on it. Basu’s comparison of the Rudolphs’ study of Gandhi and the ascent of Narendra Modi highlights the complex relationship between political leadership and historical context. The Rudolphs underscored Gandhi’s agency through political organization and mass mobilization; however, as Basu points out, both Gandhi and Modi ‘were as much products of their environment as architects who design it’, a fact that highlights the importance of historical context in enabling the emergence and efficacy of political leaders. The importance of diverse contextual factors in simultaneously enabling and constraining the agency of political leaders underscores the importance of rigorous contextual analysis for explaining trajectories of social change. In an era when human capital and technology have become increasingly central driving forces in development, Niraja Gopal Jayal, in Chapter 9, examines the politics of India’s higher education. She begins by revisiting the Rudolphs’ (1972) seminal study of higher education,

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which explores the politicization of higher education, including the state’s active role during the early decades of the post-colonial era. Though Jayal’s chapter shares the Rudolphs’ interest in the autonomy of institutions of higher education, her examination of recent years leads to a more profound concern with its erosion. Jayal highlights the irony that at a time when neoliberal ideologies suggest the roll back of state intervention and the diminution of the political sphere, higher education has become more politicized than ever. This politicization has occurred through three channels. Political leaders have used their clout to establish new institutions to meet the rising demand, while promoting policies that harness higher education to the interests of the private sector. The second channel of politicization peaked during the government of Modi’s National Democratic Alliance, as advocates of Hindutva have vociferously charged critical dissent with being ‘antinational’ and have taken forceful measures—including the killing of rationalist scholar M.M. Kalburgi—to repress it. Increasing regulation is the third channel. Liberalizing reforms were supposed to transform the role of the Indian state from politicized intervention to non-partisan technocratic regulation. Jayal’s discussion of increased regulation by the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education, and the Ministry of Human Resources shows how, in recent years, these agencies have hamstrung higher education with a new ‘license-permit raj’ that includes model syllabi to impose curricular uniformity across the country, a national exam to determine eligibility for research funding for doctoral students, and a standardized multiplechoice test that candidates must pass in order to be eligible for positions such as assistant professor or lecturer. In the name of accountability, the Indian state has increasingly micromanaged higher education in ways that have limited academic freedom, and all too often substituted partisan for public interest. Steven Wilkinson, in Chapter 10, builds on the Rudolphs’ (1964) seminal analysis of India’s civilian–military relations to explain why India, in contrast to many other countries, has succeeded in preventing military intervention in domestic politics. As the Rudolphs pointed out, early decisions by India’s leadership, including measures reducing the status and prestige of the military, maintaining military insulation from political society, mitigating international crises and threats that might lead to military build-ups, as well as creating a resilient federal system

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were crucial in enabling India’s political leadership to subordinate its military leaders. Nonetheless, recent efforts by some retired military leaders to become involved in politics, widespread mobilization among India’s three million veterans by leaders of the ‘One Rank One Pension’ campaign to reform the military pension system, as well as disagreements between military leaders and political leaders in the Ministry of Defence have incited concerns about military involvement in politics. Wilkinson examines the three most important threats to civilian control over the military. He finds that the threat of retired military officers in politics is limited by India’s strong political parties whose leaders zealously guard the perks of office for themselves. Though stubbornly persistent insurgencies in Kashmir, the North-East, and Punjab in the 1970s and 1980s have threatened to involve the military in domestic political conflicts, the strategy of building up paramilitary forces to combat insurrections has largely maintained the military’s insulation from political society. Wilkinson finds that the biggest threat to the stability of civilian–military relations in India results from the diminishing insulation of soldiers from conflicts and tensions in their villages, states, and the wider society due to technological developments in telecommunication and social media. However, he sees no threatening conflict on the horizon at the moment. Instead of civilian–military relations, Wilkinson views the failure to modernize conventional weapons systems as the most serious problem now confronting the military. In the concluding chapter, Echeverri-Gent and Sadiq investigate the implications of the Rudolphs’ scholarship for the challenges of contemporary Indian politics. They contend that the trajectory of transformational change that India is experiencing can be explained by considering two of the Rudolphs’ most seminal contributions: their contention that India’s politics is centrist due to its social pluralism and political institutions, and their provocative observations about the agency of political leadership. These contentions pose a contradiction. While the political centrism thesis is a structural argument whose variables overdetermine the continuation of Indian centrism, the Rudolphs’ observations about political leadership highlight its transformational potential. Echeverri-Gent and Sadiq apply these contentions to analyse contemporary Indian politics. They find that although Modi’s 2014 and 2019 electoral campaigns and his governance through the National Democratic Alliance government have been shaped by centrist forces,

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his government is transforming India’s political centre and shifting it away from the sphere of liberal democracy. The authors contend that the multilayered nature of Modi’s political leadership is key to his capacity to accommodate the forces of centrism while transforming India’s political mainstream. One facet of Modi’s multilayered leadership is that he and other Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders present different messages to different audiences, employing strident Hindutva ideology intended to increase communal tensions to audiences where it is politically advantageous. Another facet is that Modi has crafted multivalent political scripts that can be understood differently by different audiences. The same script may send disparate messages to different members of an audience, just as when American politicians include ‘dog whistles’ in the scripts of their political theatre. A third facet of Modi’s multilayered leadership involves his relationship with the organizations of Hindutva militants. At the same time that Modi has presented centrist positions and largely remained above the fray, militant organizations—those affiliated with the RSS as well as those independent of it—have promoted religious polarization, communal violence, and repression of dissidents. The chapter shows how the multilayered leadership of Modi and the BJP has facilitated their efforts to transform India’s democracy by accommodating the forces of centrism as they take it in majoritarian and illiberal directions.

References Monroe, Kristen Renwick, ed. 2005. Perestroika: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1958. ‘Surveys in India: Field Experience in Madras State’. Public Opinion Quarterly 22 (3): 235–44. ———. 1964. ‘Generals and Politics in India’. Pacific Affairs 37 (1): 5–19. ———. 1967. The Modernity of Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, eds. 1972. Education and Politics in India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1984. ‘Determinants and Varieties of Agrarian Mobilization’. In Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity in South Asia, edited by Meghnad Desai, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, and Ashok Rudra, 281–344. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 2006. Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 2005a. ‘The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World’. Perspective on Politics 3 (1): 5–14. ——— 2005b. ‘Perestroika and Its Other’. In Perestroika: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kirsten Renwick Monroe, 12–20. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Situated Knowledge, the Construction of Meaning, and Political Action A Framework for Interpretative Political Analysis

john echeverri-gent and kamal sadiq

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t a time when big data and sophisticated statistical models of causal inference dominate the social sciences, this chapter draws on the theories of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph to explore the contributions and limits of their interpretative approach to political analysis. Central to this mode of analysis is the concept of ‘situated knowledge’, the premise that local knowledge—understandings embedded in time, place, social relations, and culture—has an important role to play in social science analysis. The situated knowledge approach to interpretative analysis is a bottom-up process that gives priority to local knowledge and incorporates abstract theoretical concepts only after adjusting them to the local context, thereby avoiding the ‘imperialism of categories’ that results when top-down, deductive theories impose meaning on local actors. The Rudolphs’ work illustrates how distinctive individual perceptions and identities shape preferences and action. At the macro level, their analysis underscores how particular circumstances shape group identity, interests, and institutions. India’s castes, for instance, are usually constituents of oppressive social hierarchies, but under the right circumstances, they may also serve as vehicles of political mobilization supporting democratization. While the Rudolphs’ analysis of the state draws from grand social theorists—for example, Weber, Marx, and Habermas—their macroanalytic concepts integrate the insights of grand theory with the dynamism and complexity of local circumstance.

John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Situated Knowledge, the Construction of Meaning, and Political Action: A Framework for Interpretative Political Analysis. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190125011.003.0002

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Rather than positing a homogenous or teleological understanding of global modernity, the situated knowledge approach excavates the multiple pathways to modernity and the pluralism of modernity itself. We begin this introductory survey by examining the Weberian roots of the Rudolphs’ mode of political inquiry. We show that the Rudolphs’ study of situated knowledge advanced beyond Weber’s conception of multiple forms of knowledge by situating multiple interpretative perspectives within the asymmetries of power. The Rudolphs emphasized the interactive, changing, and deeply situated nature of actor motivation. The next section synthesizes insights from the Rudolphs’ work to elaborate an interpretative framework for political analysis and its methodological implications. The concluding section discusses some limits of interpretative political analysis and its position in the discipline of political science.

Weberian Roots of the Rudolphs’ Mode of Inquiry Though Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph engaged with a broad range of theoretical scholarship, none is more central to their studies than the seminal work of Max Weber. The Rudolphs were scholars of Weber. They published commentary on his work, and they came of age as scholars at a time when social scientists were engaged in contentious debates over the relative merits of Weber and Marx. In this section, we discuss Weber’s profound influence on the Rudolphs’ scholarship, first considering Weber’s theory of social action. Next, we examine the impact of Weber’s approach to political development and the state on the Rudolphs’ scholarship. Then, we explore Weber’s approach to social complexity and, in particular, multiple forms of knowledge. Finally, we consider how Weber’s concept of verstehen informed the Rudolphs’ approach to multiple ‘modes of inquiry’ within the asymmetries of power. Weber theorized social action at two levels. At the micro level, Weber offered a menu of individual motivations. People could act on the basis of individual self-interest (zweckrational). They might act to maximize their values regardless of the consequences for their own welfare (value rationality or wertrational). In addition to these different rational motivations, individuals also act on the basis of their affectual orientation, especially their emotions. Finally, Weber suggested that a great bulk

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of human action was guided by tradition or ‘reflective and habitual conduct’ (1946, 56–7). Like Weber, the Rudolphs understood individual motivation to be complex. Writing in her presidential address for the APSA, Susanne Rudolph rejected ‘the propensity of formal theory to attribute motives rather than investigate them’. At a time when rational choice and formal modelling assumed actor homogeneity, Susanne Rudolph rejected ‘Lockean universalism’ based on the assumption that individual actors are the same, because it ‘erases the markers that distinguish cultures and peoples and create identity and meaning’. Instead, she affirmed Edmund Burke’s acknowledgement of ‘strangers’ singularity, individuality, social and political identity—in a word their very mode of experience rendered their lives meaningful to themselves’. Due to her appreciation of the complex subjectivity of human motivation, Rudolph found imputing rational self-interest to actors to be problematic ‘because it ignores the role of sentiment, passion, and commitment in behavior’ and ‘because “rationality” itself is scarce rather than ubiquitous, but also because it is diversely defined by different cultures’ (Rudolph 2005a, 6, 7, and 9). In short, imputing actor motivations ignores the complicated and personal process of meaning-making that produces reasons for the actions that people choose. Weber’s theory of social action at the macro level was complex and dynamic. Though Weber did not entirely reject class as a basis for collective action, he restricted its use to an analytical category not dissimilar to Marx’s ‘class-in-itself’.1 Unlike Marx, Weber asserted that there were multiple bases for class distinctions. Class differences were based not only on property rights, but on different life chances due to income and, in some cases, whether individuals were creditors or debtors. The formation of historical class actors was highly contingent if only for the reason that other social structures shape the process of collective action. People also organized themselves into ‘status groups’ delimited by rankings in the ‘social estimate of honor’ which share ‘a specific style of life’ and turn into ‘castes’ when they become closed social groups (Weber 1946, 180–95). Because they share lifestyles, social conventions, and form social networks through intermarriage, status groups in Weber’s framework are more likely to engage in collective action than class groups, though the two may often overlap in the process, increasing the likelihood of collective class action. If classes exist in the

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economic sphere and status groups are formed in society, ‘“parties” live in the house of power’ (Weber 1946, 194). Parties may represent class or status interests, but fundamentally, Weber asserts, they are products of forms of domination that are structured by but not reducible to class or status stratification. In sum, Weber sees individual action as guided by instrumental rationality, value rationality, affect, and tradition. These motivations at the micro level produce three analytically distinct social structures at the macro level—class, status groups, and parties. These social structures interact with each other to shape ongoing but dynamic forms of collective action. The Rudolphs hold an even more complex and contingent view of political mobilization. In analysing social organization in rural India, they wrote, ‘Anyone who has tried to establish a taxonomy of social actors or their sub-sets (for example classes, status orders or cultural communities) will recognize the problematic and contingent nature of the attempt.’ Furthermore, they went on to observe that ‘the objective interests of these categories are not easily differentiated and distinguished’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1984, 283). Ultimately, their analysis of rural India highlighted the importance of status groups—such as Scheduled Castes and Tribes, backward classes, middle castes, and upper ‘twiceborn’ castes—and religious communities. The collective action of these status groups was a result of their interaction with other elements of the social context. In their classic volume The Modernity of Tradition (1967) structures of ascriptive inequality, such as caste associations, when situated in the context of democratic institutions, engaged in collective action that promoted democratization. To the extent that they considered class as a dimension of political mobilization, they adapted the concept to distinctive local circumstances. ‘Bullock capitalists’ or self-employed and funded producers whose holdings were large enough to support a pair of bullocks, but not large enough to support capital-intensive agriculture were key actors in India’s new agrarianism in the 1970s and 1980s (Rudolphs 1984, 315). The Rudolphs insisted that political mobilization grew out of people’s understanding of their lived experience. Since people do not compartmentalize their experience into conventional social science categories, the Rudolphs’ perspective was conducive to viewing political mobilization as being a product of the interaction between different social and political structures. Contemporary scholarly analyses have advanced this idea

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(Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan in Chapter 5, Agarwala and Herring in Chapter 6, and Fernandes in Chapter 7 of this volume). For Weber and the Rudolphs, political leaders were important because they played a significant role in shaping people’s understanding of their social context. Weber’s analysis (1946, 127) illuminates the transformative capacity of political leadership by suggesting that it is ‘immensely moving’ when a political leader ‘is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such a responsibility with heart and soul. … He reaches the point where he says: “Here I stand; I can do no other.”’ Weber (1978, 247) asserts that charismatic authority is an even more radical source of change. He describes it as ‘the revolutionary force’ in traditional societies that ‘may … result in a radical alteration of the central attitudes and directions of action with a completely new orientation of all attitudes towards different problems of the “world”.’ Like Weber, the Rudolphs highlighted the transformative potential of political leadership. They saw in Mahatma Gandhi a charismatic leader writ large. In an analysis that is quintessentially Weberian, but which also was informed by the political psychology of Erik Erikson,2 they analysed Gandhi’s charismatic appeal as being inspired by tradition but simultaneously driven by a social vision informed by exposure to and criticism of his cosmopolitan experience (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967, 155–247). Of course, Gandhi was an extraordinary politician, but the Rudolphs drew from his example as well as their analysis to build on Weber’s analysis. They observed that political leaders ‘must identify the realm of the possible to practice the art of the possible’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1984, 294). They went on to observe that practising the art of the possible required translating objective causes into reasons that would motivate individuals and groups to take action. Essential to turning causes into reasons is what Kristen Monroe, in Chapter 4 of this volume, has called ‘moral imagination’ or ‘the ability to view moral issues in a different light, to imagine new possibilities, to consider not just the traditional options … but also the capability, talent, and the sheer gift of envisioning alternative possibilities’ (p. 85). It also involves the use of language to frame popular calculations about the risks and costs of action relative to the benefits in ways that motivate people to join in public action. Charismatic leaders employ effective rhetoric. In short, successful political leaders translate objective conditions into popular reasons for mobilization.

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Mobilization by political leadership contributes to political development and state formation. For Weber, states are institutions of domination, which is exercised through either a monopoly of legitimate coercion or through legitimate authority and associated forms of administration. In Weber’s account, legitimate authority takes three forms—rational legal, traditional, and charismatic—which roughly parallel his four forms of individual social action (Weber 1978, vol. 2). Political development is driven by changing balances among these forms of authority and administration. The rise of rational capitalism simultaneously advances and is enabled by rational legal authority in its bureaucratic administrative form. As capitalism develops, bureaucratic forms of administration—in the private as well as the public sector—become more pervasive. Traditional authority persists to some extent, according to Weber, because aspects of individual behaviour continue to be based on custom and habit. The episodic interventions of charismatic authority often transform moribund authority structures. Charismatic leadership may even play a more important role in the modern era to the extent that political development is associated with: (1) democratization, since Weber associated democracy with opportunities for the exercise of charismatic authority, and (2) disenchantment resulting from the proliferation of bureaucracy.3 The key point is that all three forms of legitimacy persist throughout political development, and Weber’s ideal–typical analysis of authority structures should not obscure the fact that a society’s trajectory of political development is shaped by the complementarities and contradictions that develop in it.4 Political development for Weber is also deformed when institutions get out of balance. Weber pointed out that the coordinated expertise that made bureaucracy a potent force for economic development also made it an autonomous force that could come to dominate politicians and society. Socialism, in Weber’s eyes, was the most egregious example of bureaucracy run amok, but bureaucratic domination might occur even in capitalist societies when bureaucratic officials reduce politicians to dilettantes and when resistance from the private sector is divided and weak.5 The Rudolphs’ approach to political development is a direct extension of Weber’s analysis. In their view, societies became modern not by displacing tradition but by modernizing through tradition (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). They pointed out how Gandhi created a modern

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mass movement and helped to create an impressive, modern political party through charisma grounded in traditional values. Indians engaged in democratic participation through caste associations. In their awardwinning examination of modern bureaucracy, they pointed out how persisting patrimonial features such as loyalty and affect can increase administrative efficiency (Rudolph and Rudolph 1979).6 Like Weber, their work showed how bureaucracies’ accumulation of knowledge and expertise can be a source of power. The Indian state’s ‘“permanent government”—its highly professional, technically expert, and wellinstitutionalized bureaucracy’ is a source of state strength.7 Conversely, deinstitutionalization of the bureaucracy leads to state weakness. During the first decades after Independence, the state became a powerful ‘third actor’ that preempted class conflict by sidelining organized labour and capital. Like Weber, the Rudolphs recognized the ambivalence of state autonomy—it might free the state from particular interests and enable it to represent broad public interests, but it also attenuates accountability enabling it to sacrifice public interests to its own narrow interests, as shown by Jayal’s study (Chapter 9 in this volume) of the state and India’s institutions of higher education. The Rudolphs shared fundamental aspects of Weber’s ontology and epistemology. For both, the world was complex and social processes were contingent on the distinctive circumstances that prevailed in a particular conjuncture. Though the Rudolphs were not frequent users of ideal types, they appreciated how ideal types enabled analysts to capture important partial truths of complex realities. Indeed, as Vivien Schmidt points out in Chapter 3, the Rudolphs endorsed Weber’s (2001 [1905]) advocacy in the final pages of The Protestant Ethic, of multiple epistemes and pluralism of ways of knowing. In addition, they advanced Weber’s analysis by associating multiple interpretative perspectives with asymmetries of power. The Rudolphs pointed out that members of subaltern groups, such as colonized persons or marginalized minorities, are often excluded from the public record and conventional analysis of social scientists. They advocated rectifying this distorting omission by examining narratives such as the diaries of subalterns (Rudolph and Rudolph 2003, 683). Epistemologically, the Rudolphs’ interpretative approach drew heavily from Weber’s emphasis on verstehen, or interpretative understanding. Weber took a nuanced position on social science analysis.

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He carefully negotiated a position between stricter nomothetic approaches, such as those of Hume and Hempel, which insisted on causal analysis through law like explanations such as can be found in the physical sciences and idiographic approaches that reject the possibility of causal explanation.8 Weber contended that the social sciences were distinguished from the physical sciences because in the former, causation was associated with intentionality. In the social sciences, Weber asserted, there were two types of understanding, direct observation and explanatory understanding, which require the analyst to understand an actor’s motive and meaning. Weber’s work privileged explanatory understanding for at least two reasons. He felt that it led to greater conceptual and theoretical precision. He also contended that explanatory understanding enabled analysts to select the best among contending theories.9 As elaborated above, Weber conceptualized individual motivation as complex, drawing from a repertoire of motivations. Furthermore, he insisted that we can only understand an actor’s motive and meaning by situating it in a broader context. The complexity of actor motivation and the importance of context inclined Weber towards detailed historical analysis, though it is important to note that in Weber’s view, there were different forms of meaning, and some forms—for example, ‘the average or approximate meaning attributable to a given plurality of actors’—are not inconsistent with more quantitative methods (Weber 1978, 1, 4). Like Weber, the Rudolphs emphasized intention and meaning as an important part of social science analysis. Although their work makes a strong case for giving interpretative approaches a place at the table of political science, they viewed the discipline as an ‘open-ended category’ where different perspectives should contend. They argued for a political science that is problem-driven—as opposed to method-driven—and where modes of inquiry suit the problems addressed. Theory building, according to the Rudolphs, should not be a top-down process where deductively conceived concepts impute identity and interests to actors. Instead, it should be a bottom-up process, beginning with the exploration of local contexts comprised of distinctive circumstances and local knowledge from which actors construct meaning and motivation. At the individual level, the Rudolphs’ understanding of identity was even more fluid than Weber’s, in that they emphasized its liminality over and above its hybridity. Not only did individuals have multiple

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identities but they shifted from one identity to another as their context—in particular, their social relations—changed. The complexity and contingency of the Rudolphs’ world view led them to urge that theory should consist of ‘fragile templates, made of soft clay, rather than of hard steel, that adapt to the variety of evidence and break when they do not fit’ (Susanne Rudolph 1987, ‘Presidential Address’).

Situated Knowledge and Interpretative Political Analysis The concept of ‘situated knowledge’ was one of the Rudolphs’ most distinctive contributions to the study of politics. The centrality of situated knowledge in the Rudolphs’ analysis led them to develop a distinctive interpretative mode of inquiry with important methodological, epistemological, and ontological implications for political analysis. In this section, we build on the Rudolphs’ interpretative mode of inquiry. We show how ‘situated knowledge’ is a process—embedded in time, place, social relations, and culture—through which actors create meaning from their objective circumstances. Then we show that, according to the Rudolphs, understanding the meanings produced by actors is essential to political analysis because these meanings create motivations that induce actions, which in turn shape political outcomes. We draw upon different contributions in this volume to elaborate these insights and advance the Rudolphs’ analysis.

Enriching Our Concept of Context We follow the Rudolphs in emphasizing context as the formative structure of situated knowledge. Many conventional social scientific inquiries are based on a flat, two-dimensional understanding of context (Figure 2.1). Such an analysis situates actors and processes in contexts comprising configurations of social relations, time, and places. Frequently, as Michael Burawoy (1998, 13) argues, positive social science and survey researchers view context ‘as a challenge’, which they seek to control by limiting ‘context effects’.10 Vivien Schmidt (Chapter 3 of this volume) recounts how the different ways that scholars viewed context established clear battle lines in early debates among social scientists. Some scholars attempted to order contexts

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Time

Place

Figure 2.1 The conventional view of context Source: Authors.

into law like, systemic regularities. Others viewed context as more complex and idiosyncratic. Though social scientists have developed more sophisticated analytical tools and ontologies since these early days, this distinction continues to divide many scholars (Susanne Rudolph 2005a, 2005b). The Rudolphs viewed context as a vital object of inquiry and not a challenge to rigorous research and law like generalizations. Rather than trying to control for context, the Rudolphs’ analysis investigates its richness to reveal the complex relationships between context, actor perceptions, and their exercise of agency for political action. Their conceptualization of context transforms the conventional two-dimensional understanding into a three-dimensional one by adding culture as a vibrant dimension (see Figure 2.2). The Rudolphs’ conceptualization of culture is itself complex, being comprised of practices, symbolic systems, and reflexivity. In the three-dimensional view that we have formulated below, actors construct subjective meaning (X) on the basis of their experience of social relations, time, place, and culture. Their lived experience is constructed from the distinctive contextual circumstances resulting from the particular traits of these dimensions and their complex interaction. It is important to interpret actors’ experiences and understandings of their distinctive context in order to explain their motivation for action. The Rudolphs remind us that political leadership can play a catalytic role in this process by framing the construction

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Social Relations

Meaning Reasons Action X

Y

Culture

Time

Place

Figure 2.2

Situated knowledge

Source: Authors.

of meaning in ways that may motivate action or inaction. Below we discuss each contextual dimension (see Table 2.1).

Social Relations Social relations refer to an actor’s position vis-à-vis others; these are situated within three interrelated hierarchies based on: status, economics, and politics (see Table 2.1). Status relations are based on an actor’s ascribed characteristics including (i) caste, race, and ethnicity; (ii) lineage or kinship group/pattern; (iii) religion; and (iv) gender. They may also refer to an actor’s social position gained through achieved characteristics such as education, moral standing within a community, or social networks. One’s position within hierarchies formed by these relationships is dynamic due to social change and because the values and meanings attributed to traits change. For example, Steven Wilkinson (Chapter 10 of this volume) finds that changing social circumstances have altered interaction within the Indian military’s status hierarchy. The expansion of primary school education has led to increasing ‘political awareness’ among military personnel. This contrasts with the ‘substantially illiterate’ Independence-era army. The rise of ‘backward caste assertiveness’ in Indian society, what Christophe Jaffrelot (2002) has termed a ‘Silent Revolution’, has empowered jawans (soldiers) to no longer ‘unquestioningly accept some of the inequalities and injustices of military’ life.

2. Continuities are not only constraints but serve as the building blocks of change

3. The meaning of history is contested

2. Economic relations a. class b. debtor/creditor c. consumer/producer

3. Position in political hierarchy a. relationship to state (rights and citizenship) b. political affiliation (parties, interest groups, and demand groups)

Source: Authors.

Time

1. Structured chronological change

1. Status relations based on ascribed or achieved personal traits

3. The imagination of the meaning of place is often important in issues such as immigration and uneven development

2. Humanly devised institutions

1. Geographical location with physical features

Place

Features of situated knowledge

Social relations

Table 2.1 Culture

3. Culture includes diverse symbols and practices that are often mutually constitutive

2. Individuals with multiple roles and liminality

1. Symbolic systems a. cognitive concepts and norms b. language

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Economic Relations Economic relations refer to an actor’s position in the hierarchies of income, wealth, and property rights. They also involve relations between debtors and creditors, producers and consumers, the landless and landlords, et cetera. Similar to status relations, economic relations frequently change as a consequence of endogenous processes and external events. Class, in terms of relations to property rights, is often an important component of economic relations. Agarwala and Herring (Chapter 6 of this volume) find class analysis to be especially useful in illuminating the consequences of ‘contradictory class positions’ or people owning some capital (for example, land, bullocks/tractors, a sewing machine) but also forced to sell their labour. Indeed, they find people occupying contradictory class positions in India’s populous agrarian economy and the swelling ranks of the informal sector to be of critical importance in India’s political economy. Furthermore, they point out that class is impactful even when it is not visible because it shapes the demands of different groups and their capacity to mobilize. In addition, the structural power of capital, by rendering the state dependent upon it for economic growth, is a potent political resource.

Political Relations Political relations entail two sets of relationships. The first derives from an actor’s official relationship with the state in terms of citizenship and rights. When rights are unevenly allocated or protected, it creates a hierarchy among people living within a designated territory. Citizens have more rights than non-citizen immigrants and refugees, but even among citizens, some can use their wealth and personal connections to secure better legal protection. Workers in the informal sector are less protected than workers in the organized sector. Some citizens have the right of affirmative action while others do not. These hierarchies can change when new actors gain access to state power or when the strategies of incumbent authorities change. A second type of political relationship derives from an actor’s political affiliation with political parties or civil society groups. One of the Rudolphs’ significant contributions was to point out that these affiliations are not always institutionalized. Their concept of ‘demand groups’ addresses the way that individuals or groups form associations around

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common demands and engage in ‘mass mobilization’ to gain favourable policy responses instead of relying on ‘expert knowledge and technical bargaining’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 247). In pursuit of their interests, local-level demand groups often attempt to build support among civil society groups, political parties, or government agencies in ways that transcend traditional, social, or economic hierarchies. Analytically distinguishing different types of social relationships should not obscure their complex interaction and dynamism. One type of social relationship may supersede another when it comes to the production of meaning and social action. For instance, the Rudolphs contended that in India, caste or religion as status hierarchies usually preempted meaning-making and political action based on class (1984). However, social relations are often mutually constitutive in ways that drive social and political change. Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan (Chapter 5 of this volume) show how growing economic differentiation among dominant castes creates pressures that potentially threaten to divide them. At the same time, affirmative action has elevated the status of many members of scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and ‘other backward castes’, while lowering the relative status of the less affluent segments of the dominant castes. These changes are driving the remarkable demand for affirmative action by heretofore dominant castes such as the Patels in Gujarat and the Jats in Haryana. Agarwala and Herring (Chapter 6 of this volume) also underscore the importance of the interaction of different forms of social relationships. Though they contend that class remains the most basic interest structure, they posit that individuals have multiple identities and interests, which contribute to diverse collective action strategies in ‘a shared tool kit’ that actors draw from in context-dependent ways. Fernandes (Chapter 7 of this volume) makes a similar point with the observation that ‘class structuration does not precede but is produced through social networks that are shaped by cultural identities such as gender [and] religion’.

Time In the Rudolphs’ work, time is structured change. For many analysts, continuity and change stand in historical tension. For the Rudolphs, continuities are the building blocks of change. Mahatma Gandhi used ancient religious language and symbols to mobilize a nationalist

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movement, leading to the establishment of a modern political party and state. Traditional caste organization became a vehicle for political participation in modern democracy. The manner in which context structures change is similar to path dependence, in that context limits possibilities while promoting particular trajectories. The Rudolphs’ conception of time differs from that of path dependence in that they do not divide it into periods of relative stability and critical junctures with heightened contingency. Cappocia and Keleman (2007, 343) contend that during critical junctures, ‘structural (that is, the economic, cultural, ideological, and organizational) influences on political action are significantly relaxed for a relatively short period’. For the Rudolphs, change takes place through individual agency rather than through the relaxation of constraints. Leaders play a particularly important role in bringing about change either through their charisma or through the way that they interpret the elements of their context to mobilize others. The interpretative approach illuminates the contestation of historical meaning. Amrita Basu (Chapter 8) shows how the reinterpretation of Indian history, especially the independence movement and Mahatma Gandhi, has played an important role in the ascendance of Narendra Modi and the BJP.

Place Situated knowledge is informed by place in two ways (see Table 2.1). First, place can be thought of in geographical terms, a location and material reality that affects actors and the meanings that they create. The physical features of Rajasthan—for instance, its aridity and the types of agriculture that its geography makes possible—exemplify this aspect of place. A second aspect of place is comprised of the distinctive institutions that people create. The meaning of place often involves interpretative construction. Consider the distinction between ‘Bharat’ and ‘India’. While ‘Bharat’ may refer to India’s countryside, it may also denote a distinctive construction of social relations, domestic culture, and institutions that are construed to mean ‘authentic’. ‘India’ not only refers to cities but also involves more individualistic and less communitarian institutions, and a more cosmopolitan and less parochial culture. The construction of place often plays an important role in political controversies involving issues such as migration and uneven development.

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Institutions are also affected by interpretation. Mahoney and Thelen (2010) show how institutions with ambiguous objectives are often converted to serve new objectives, while Grief and Laitin (2004) show how the weakening of ideas supporting institutions can contribute to institutional breakdown.

Culture Building on the Rudolphs, we delineate culture as comprising symbolic systems that represent interpersonal cognitive concepts and norms that are shared by people through their language and practice. In the interpretative approach, symbolic systems and language are the tools that people use to create meaning. Shared symbols have important cognitive and normative consequences. They shape peoples’ understanding of how the world works. They also affect peoples’ assessments of the desirability of certain actions and events. In fact, in the interpretative approach, cultural values are associated with ethics and emotions that play an important role in political analysis, as demonstrated by the Rudolphs’ study of Gandhi’s leadership, especially his strategy of satyagraha. Symbols and values may evoke emotions and what Kristen Monroe (Chapter 4 of this volume) calls ‘moral salience’ which shape meaning in ways that often are essential elements of motivation for political action. The interpretativist approach is critical of rational actor models that deductively impute actor preferences. It leverages complex cultural understandings of local context to yield more accurate accounts of preferences and strategies for action. The situated knowledge approach to culture is multi-level, pluralistic, and dynamic. Symbolic systems link individual knowledge to macro symbolic systems of knowledge and values (Geertz 1983, 69). Micro and macro levels of culture interact to produce cultural change. For instance, Lloyd Rudolph’s (1992) study of the impact of television serialization of religious epics, such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, illuminated how these television shows created new standardized national narratives that replaced diverse parochial narratives which, for more than one thousand years, had been adapted to local audiences. State-sponsored media altered local religious customs and norms—a process that standardized religious practice and displaced ‘the localism and diversity of religious identity’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008a, 229).

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Pluralism of culture means that symbolic systems include incongruous elements. At the micro level, individuals possess and act through multiple roles and identities that, at first flush, may not seem compatible. The Rudolphs developed the concept of liminality to highlight the fluidity of identities whose relative salience is determined by how individuals understand their context (Rudolphs 2003, 683).11 Later interpretativist work, as demonstrated by Agarwala and Herring (Chapter 6 of this volume) and Fernandes (Chapter 7 of this volume), advances beyond the approaches that view different cultural symbols as competing and exclusionary to show how cultural symbols and practices interact to create a mutually constitutive process. To better understand these alternative perspectives on culture, we need to consider how people’s construction of meaning shapes their political action.

From Context to Meaning and Action In the Rudolphs’ interpretative mode of inquiry, action, though structured by context, is not reducible to it. The Rudolphs write that even ‘apparently desperate objective conditions do not always translate into sufficient reasons to engage in political action’. In their view, objective conditions ‘are distant and necessary, not proximate and sufficient conditions for social action’. Objective circumstances must be translated into subjective reasons for action supplying ‘proximate and sufficient conditions for mobilization’. These reasons consist of ‘meaning and intention, the purposes, goals and values that inspire and orient actors, and the calculations that they make about risks and costs in relation to the probabilities and benefits of success attending proposed remedial measures’ (1984, 287–8). Political action is not the product of an unthinking pursuit of contextually determined interests. It is about the way actors imbue their context with meaning, conceptualize their reasons and objectives for action, and fashion strategies to achieve their objectives (Hay 2011). The process of translating context into reasons and action involves the attribution of meaning to circumstances. The construction of meaning is a complex process. Meaning is situated knowledge. It is conditioned by, but not reducible to, the interaction of time, place, social relations, and culture. With reference to Figure 2.2, X  represents meaning as a location within the three-dimensional space.

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Its formation is a consequence of an actor’s experience of each dimension. It is important to understand an actor’s location in relation to the different contextual dimensions since it shapes her construction of meaning, but reducing meaning to mere reflections of context underestimates an actor’s agency in the meaning-making process. Actors occupying similar positions in relation to the dimensions of situated knowledge may construct very different meanings from their experiences.

Meaning, Agency, and Leadership The interpretative approach gives actors wide latitude to construct meaning and remarkable agency to change their context. Social and cultural pluralism also enhances the prospects for agency achieved through the construction of meaning. Monroe (Chapter 4) points out that social pluralism helps people see beyond dominant world views. The Rudolphs’ concept of ‘liminality’ (2003, 683) helps explain why. Having shown how cultural pluralism provides individuals with multiple, differentiated roles and identities, the Rudolphs’ analysis of Amar Singh’s liminality illuminates how his multiple social positions enabled him to fashion a ‘critical self-awareness’ and a capacity to selfevaluate, which is an essential basis for individual agency. Actors’ capacity for empathy is another source of agency. The Rudolphs show how ‘putting yourself in the other’s shoes’ was an essential element of Gandhi’s satyagraha (Rudolphs 2006, 159). Perhaps Gandhi exemplified moral salience and moral imagination better than anyone, as elaborated by Kristen Monroe (Chapter 4). Monroe observes how ‘perceptions of reality may create human connections that serve as crucibles for social and political interaction’. These human connections, according to Monroe, create the basis of ‘moral salience’ that makes the suffering of others poignant. Moral salience is the first step towards ‘moral imagination’ or the ability to see beyond dominant or traditional strategies for resolving moral dilemmas and envisioning alternative possibilities. Monroe’s work on individual responses to the holocaust illuminates how moral salience and moral imagination can lead to agency even at great personal risk. Indeed, the emotions and ethics that underpin moral

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salience and imagination explain altruistic action in the most adverse circumstances. At the same time that it expands the scope of individual agency, the interpretative approach underscores the importance of political leadership. While the Rudolphs were aware of the importance of organizational management skills for political leadership—having described Gandhi’s transformation of the Indian National Congress (INC) from an elitist club of political amateurs to a grounded, modern, and professional organization (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967)— their most innovative contribution to the study of political leadership was their conceptualization of political theatre. A vital skill of political leadership is the ability to strategically orchestrate performances that are staged to shape the understandings and motivations of supporters and adversaries. The scripts of Gandhi’s political theatre were usually inspired by values and customs—for example, ahimsa, khilafat,12 political liberalism, et cetera—that enabled him to connect with his audience of supporters and adversaries. Gandhi’s remarkable success in using cultural symbols demonstrates Monroe’s (Chapter 4) broader contention that culture is filled with ‘stories’ that enable the public to see their connections with others in ways that encourage collective action and even acts of altruism. Satyagraha was one of Gandhi’s most vibrant scripts whose effectiveness was founded on traditional Indian values and his understanding of his British adversaries. Performances such as satyagraha created social relationships between actors and audiences. They inspired Gandhi’s supporters by establishing an emotional connection with him and among themselves. They created ‘situational truths’ (Rudolphs 2006) that initiated conversations and evoked empathy from adversaries, in the process changing hearts and minds and increasing prospects for consensual agreements. Amrita Basu (Chapter 8) reminds us that traditional symbols can also be used to advance psychologies of fear and anger which seek to sideline inclusion in favour of ‘modern hate’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1993). The very symbols used by Gandhi to bring people together, under very different circumstances, have been used to divide people and foster animosity. These contrasting uses of symbols and practices demonstrate that their meaning is shaped by the on-going discourses and ideologies in which they are embedded.

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Meaning, Discourse, and Emotion Vivien Schmidt’s (Chapter 3) development of ‘discursive institutionalism’ builds on the Rudolphs’ interpretative perspective to provide a better understanding of the importance of discursive exchange in constructing meaning and promoting change. For Schmidt, ideas are a fundamental component of discourse. They consist of cognitive elements which explain how the world works, and normative elements which suggest what actions are appropriate and desirable. Ideas affect discourse at three levels. Policy solutions address immediate policy problems on the political agenda. Programmes are general orientations that delimit the nature of policy problems, policy priorities, and elements of policy solutions. At the most general level there are public philosophies and sentiments based on general ontologies and values. Discourse involves the representation of ideas and their social exchange. It serves to organize and coordinate the ideas of those engaged in deliberation and negotiation, as well as to persuade and legitimize specific ideas more broadly throughout society. Discursive exchange facilitates agency by enabling people to develop critical understandings of political issues as well as languages that resonate with and mobilize segments of the public. However, the development of agency through discourse is shaped by the power of actors to: (1) persuade others to support their ideas, (2) control the meaning of ideas, and (3) control which ideas gain access to the discursive agenda and, therefore, can structure the discourse. The Rudolphs underscore the importance of emotions as a component of discourse. They quote Gandhi’s observation, ‘Experience has shown that mere appeal to the reason produces no effect upon those who have settled convictions. … The Satyagrahi strives to reach the reason through the heart. The method of reaching the heart is to awaken public opinion.’ They go on to note, ‘Gandhi, in effect, critiques Habermas’ [and Manin’s] conception of deliberation by insisting that rationality without feeling cannot yield knowledge, truth, or public good’ (2006, 158). The Rudolphs note that political leaders may also use emotional appeals for socially destructive objectives. They point out how political leaders in India and around the world invent ‘ancient hatreds’ leading to massive outbreaks of violence in order to achieve their own personal political objectives (Rudolph and Rudolph 1993). Kristen Monroe (Chapter 4) develops these points with the observation

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that there are a range of social outcomes that cannot be explained without understanding ‘how perceptions of reality create human connections that humanize, or dehumanize, relations with others’. These acts range from remarkable altruism involving risking one’s own life in an effort to save others from the horrors of the holocaust to horrible acts of genocide based on the acceptance of dehumanized depictions of ‘the other’. Emotion plays a role in discourse that results in extraordinary acts. It may also be an important factor in quotidian acts of political persuasion. It most certainly is a crucial factor in the appeal of populism from Narendra Modi’s Hindutva to Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’.

The Implications of Interpretativism for Methodology Scholars working in the interpretativist analytical tradition develop methods based on their fundamental values, ontology and epistemology, and research objectives. The Rudolphs’ humanistic values led them to focus their analysis on people’s lived experience. In their world view, people create their lived experience by constructing meaning from their context. This process of meaning-making, or the production of what we have called situated knowledge, is complex and contingent. Understanding the creation of situated knowledge requires us to take a relational view of people and their context. People make meaning from their experience of their context. They bring a diverse and often contradictory set of epistemological tools to the process of meaningmaking. Their epistemological toolkits result from their various social roles, skills, and motivations—instrumental rationality, value rationality, affection, and habit. Context is also complex and contingent. It includes the dimensions of social relations, time, place, and culture. Each dimension is intricate and fluid in no small measure because of people’s incessantly creative engagement with it. This dynamism of dimensions is also a product of how people, through their lived experience, combine them in mutually constitutive or intersectional ways. The Rudolphs’ research objective was to understand how people interpreted their context to create situated knowledge in terms of meaning and motivation, which in turn led to political action. The complex and dynamic nature of this process leads interpretativists to

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utilize methods with ethnographic sensibilities to study the construction of meaning and the production of political action. The ethnographic sensibilities of the Rudolphs and other interpretativists involve a commitment ‘to chronicle aspects of lived experience and to place that experience in conversation wth prevailing scholarly themes, problems, and concepts’ (Wedeen 2010, 257). The ethnographic mode of inquiry often involves multidisciplinary analysis to understand the lived relationship between people and their context. While not eschewing causal explanation, the interpretative approach elevates the relative importance of constructed meanings in the explanations of social outcomes. The investigation of attributed meanings often results in ‘multiplicities of interpretation’ (Yanow 2014). Rather than impeding theorization, multiple understandings often provide the building blocks for theory construction. For instance, when Scott (1977, 1985) observed that poor peasants and landlords produced contesting narratives of events, he showed how the disagreements were synthesized into a ‘moral economy’, which in turn shaped the meanings of acts and ultimately the strategies that the actors pursued. The interpretativists’ focus on context and meaning-making leads to an expansive sensitivity to power. Power is conceptualized not merely as an instrumental act between people but also insinuates itself across a wide range of social relationships and becomes embedded in the process of generating knowledge. Proper understanding of local context is essential for an insightful analysis of the meaning-making process that results in political action and change. The analytical centrality to interpretativism of this process led the Rudolphs (2003) to argue for the importance of ‘subjective knowledge’ in social science analysis. Since patriarchy, racism, colonialism, class, and status domination conceal the full political life of subaltern groups from public record, subjective knowledge is an important source of information about their experiences. Subjective knowledge can help explain identity formation and the construction of categories such as race, gender, and class, which are central to understanding how peoples’ experience of context gets translated into forms of political action or inaction. The Rudolphs’ appreciation of the importance of subjective knowledge led them to advocate James Clifford’s (1986) ‘rigorous partiality’ based on the epistemological claim ‘that knowing the whole truth is a capacity not given to mortals. The best they can do

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is to strive for partial truths’ (Rudolphs 2003, 682). Rigorous partiality is premised on the situated nature of all truths. The Rudolphs contend that partial truths have an essential role to play in social sciences when analysts self-consciously acknowledge the limits produced by the sociology of their knowledge. The Rudolphs were concerned that the conventional training which many social scientists received led to ‘trained incapacity’ or an inability to ‘think out of the box of disciplinary standards’ (Aldrich 2014, 66–72). They found that interviews, when done properly, contributed to a fruitful multidisciplinary approach. As Frank Hoeber’s preface to this volume demonstrates, the Rudolphs put great effort into preparing for interviews. They highlighted the importance for the interviewer to establish her authority with the interviewee. They gave a remarkable amount of thought to the sequence of their questions, and they tried to frame their questions in ways that would engage and provoke their interviewee. Interviews were an opportunity to establish a human connection with their interviewees. As such, the Rudolphs looked to them to understand their psychological orientation and the complexity of their connection with their context. Well-conceived interviews revealed people’s perceptions of their context, their expectations regarding future developments, and the emotions that inevitably were part of their strategic decisions. Actors’ identities—in all of their dimensions—are also essential to understanding their political choices, and careful interviews are one of the best ways to discover what identities are adopted. As the works of Steven Lukes (2005) and John Gaventa (1980) demonstrate, power affects actors in multiple and often subtle ways. Interviews are an incisive technique to better understand the nuances of power. ‘Serial interviewing’ (Read 2018) can play an important role in understanding the nuances of context and meaning. This method helps build trust between the researcher and the subject. It facilitates the cross-checking of information between interview sessions and enables an exploration of complex issues that require time and detail. The use of one-session interviews is on the presumption that the interviewees are forthcoming and that their information is true, knowable, and representative (Read 2018). However, interviewees in fact have much incentive to conceal or distort responses (Sadiq 2005). Serial interviewing minimizes such challenges. Moreover, to fully understand the complexity of power, identity formation, social mobilization,

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or other multifaceted processes, the use of serial interviews with key informants is a better strategy in generating valid and truthful insights and viewpoints. Changing observations and new insights can result not only from the deepening of the relationship between interviewer and informant but also from the social changes that occur in the interim between interviews. Thus, serial interviewing provides an opportunity to develop better understandings of people’s response to social change (Burawoy 2003). Interviewing led to some of the Rudolphs’ most innovative observations, such as the powerful impact of group opinion on individuals in India, which they pointed out should not be obscured by the methodological individualist assumptions of Western survey techniques. Attentive interviews also produced the revelation that caste associations were vital forms of associational life in India as opposed to the associational forms presumed by Western ideas. This insight, along with their study of Mahatma Gandhi, resulted in what they considered to be their most significant theoretical contribution— ‘the modernity of tradition’ according to which social change did not move in a unilinear fashion with modernity replacing tradition. On the contrary, ‘change could and did come about by adaptation of traditional institutions to new circumstances and demands’ (Rudolphs 2008, 280). Analysis of literary narratives is another vital technique of the Rudolphs’ interpretative mode of inquiry. The Rudolphs appreciated the insights that literature revealed about relationships between people within a narrative and between the characters in a text and its readers. Without question, the Rudolphs’ extensive literary mastery improved their understanding of the human condition. The Rudolphs spent an immense amount of time analysing a distinctive narrative form: autobiography: in particular, those of Mahatma Gandhi and Amar Singh. From these narratives they garnered insights about: the psychology of colonialism in India, both of the rulers and especially of the ruled (Susanne Rudolph 1963); the sources of charisma (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967); and the way in which establishing a human connection with an adversary could enhance persuasive power and strategic insight (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006). In reading these narratives they found it especially useful to focus on analysing the author’s identity formation. For example, their work on Amar Singh

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revealed how he maintained multiple roles and identities (Rudolph, Rudolph, and Kanota 2002). The Rudolphs studied the consequences this had for the development of his strategies for action. Narratives in interpretative analysis are not idiosyncratic stories and anecdotes. They are analytical windows onto broader issues. Because most histories obscured the identities of subalterns, the Rudolphs showed how narratives could be used to develop a better understanding of group identities, interests, and actions. They also used narrative analysis to look for Wittgensteinian ‘rules’ (Wittgenstein 1953) that served as indicators of patterns of behaviour reflecting broader norms, ethics, and power asymmetries (Rudolphs 2003). Central to interpretative analysis is the recognition that just as the knowledge of the research subject is situated, so also is the knowledge acquired by the researcher. The Rudolphs urged political scientists to problematize their role as observer and account for ‘the duality of observer and observed’ in the development of their observations (Rudolphs 2003, 682). This reflexive approach contrasts with positivist scholarship which attempts to insulate the object of study from the research in order to minimize any distortions arising from the researcher’s analysis. Positivism strives to do so by limiting reactivity to the researcher’s intervention, maximizing the reliability of the criteria used for data selection, striving to maximize data availability and the transparency of procedures for data selection in order to enable replicability, and attempting to maximize the representativeness of the sample of the population under study (Katz 1983, cited in Burawoy 1998). The approach offered by interpretativists is based on a reflexive model of science. It explores the issue of ‘positionality’ or how the social positions—for example, gender, race, class, sexuality, et cetera—of the researcher and the researched influence knowledge claims (Lichterman 2017). It accepts that researchers inevitably impact the people that they study (Burawoy 1998). Reflection about the relationship between the researcher and the research participant reveals a great deal about how power shapes situated knowledge through processes such as domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization (Burawoy 1998). Lichterman (2017) points out that the positionality of a researcher leads to partiality of knowledge. He advocates a more ‘interpretative reflexivity’ in light of his view that the

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knowledge claims of the researcher are conditioned and partial, and that social relations between the researcher and the researched are inevitably mediated by ongoing, mutual interpretation. Interpretative reflexivity underscores the importance of transparently reporting how the researcher discerned people’s meanings, and it invites readers to engage in a critical dialogue about the research claims. Although one might think that the positivist and reflexive approaches are incompatible, Burawoy (1998) and Yanow (2014) highlight their complementarity. Positivist scholarship prioritizes generalized observations by attempting to minimize context effects; however, in doing so, it obscures the relations between power and knowledge. Reflexive scholarship accepts the effects of context. It analyses a researcher’s positionality with respect to her knowledge claims. It underscores the distinctiveness of the cases under study while illuminating the intersubjective dynamics of the relationship between the researcher and the researched, particularly the relationship between knowledge and power. Through this analysis we develop a better understanding of the researcher’s situated knowledge and of situated knowledge more generally. *** This chapter has drawn from the work of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph to elaborate an interpretative approach to political analysis. It began by showing that the Rudolphs’ work is deeply rooted in the writings of Max Weber, a scholar who, like the Rudolphs, was concerned with embedding a more complex and human model of decision-making in the understandings of social context. Next, we synthesized insights from the Rudolphs’ corpus of work into an interpretative analytical framework. We began by showing how the Rudolphs’ interpretative approach offers a richer and more complex understanding of social context. Then, we highlighted the importance of human intermediation between context and action by insisting that political action required people to formulate reasons to motivate their action or inaction. The situated-knowledge model elaborated in this chapter accounts for the idiosyncracies of individual and local practice while enabling contingent generalizations across cases. It corresponds to

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what Clifford Geertz identified as a ‘characteristic intellectual movement’ that navigates ‘between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view’ (Geertz 1983, 69). The Rudolphs gave political leadership a central role in the translation of context into reasons, and they attributed a remarkable degree of agency to individuals and their leaders. A key factor in this high degree of agency is the Rudolphs’ recognition that reasons often combine rationality with emotion. When actors realize empathetic human connections with others they may engage in extraordinary acts of altruism. When their perceptions of others are characterized by an absence of human connection, they are capable of horrible acts of atrocity. Methodologically, the Rudolphs advocated the importance of interviews and narratives as techniques that enabled scholars to develop nuanced understandings of actors’ perceptions of context and the complex process through which they developed reasons for their actions. The Rudolphs’ interpretative mode of analysis illuminates how new understandings are produced by the interaction of different levels of culture. It identifies and analyses actors overlooked by other forms of analysis, even though their actions play an important role in shaping social outcomes. The interpretative framework offers a rich analysis of agency, showing how it is simultaneously shaped by objective circumstances and individual perceptions, analytical frames, values, and emotions. It illuminates how power shapes the knowledge of political actors and the scholars who analyse them. By revealing how distinctive configurations of context and agency bear upon political outcomes, it leads to the development of compelling and innovative political analyses. The interpretative approach to political analysis is not merely an analytical perspective, it is a larger political project that rigorously advocates methodological pluralism and rejects any claim to a monopoly over proper theory and practice. It calls for political scientists to take a more humane and self-aware approach to political analysis. It challenges scholars to create ‘a self-conscious discipline, a discipline that recognizes and accepts the role difference plays in scholarship, but whose reflexivity helps its differently situated members to see common ground’ (Rudolph 2005b).

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Endnotes 1. Weber writes, ‘[C]lasses are not communities; they merely represent possible, and frequent, bases for communal action’ (Weber 1946, 181). The rest of this paragraph draws from this essay. 2. As Kristen Monroe observes in her chapter for this volume, while at Harvard, Susanne Rudolph worked with Erik Erikson. See also Erik H. Erikson (1969). 3. On the spread of rationality and bureaucracy inciting people to become more open to charismatic appeals, see Scaff (1987). 4. Conflict plays a big role in Weber’s approach to politics and political development. See, for instance, Lassman (2001). 5. For a discussion of these themes in Weber’s work, see Beetham (1974, 72–89). 6. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (1979). An earlier version of this article won the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper delivered at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. 7. The discussion in the previous sentence and the rest of the paragraph is from Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (1987). 8. Ringer (1997, 1–5). Note also that Susanne Hoeber Rudolph describes Weber as attempting to reconcile ‘the claims of the Natur Wissenschaften and the Geistes Wissenschaften’ (Susanne H. Rudolph 2005b, 15). 9. Debates over the value of verstehen as a form of analysis remain a vital part of contemporary sociology. See, for instance, the informative exchange in the American Journal of Sociology. Duncan J. Watts (2014, 2017); and Turko and Zuckerman (2017). 10. Burawoy identifies the four ‘contexts effects’ as (1) the interview effect, (2) the respondent effect, (3) the field effect, and (4) the situation effect. Burawoy notes, these ‘context effects’ are controlled by what Jack Katz (1983) calls the 4 Rs of positive research, namely reactivity, reliability, replicability, and representativeness (Burawoy 1998, 10). 11. See Chandra (2012) for a related approach analysing how individuals construct their identities from multiple identity dimensions. 12. Khilafat refers to the Khilafat Movement in India (1919–24) involving mass mobilizations to oppose the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Support for it, as an expression of Hindu–Muslim solidarity, was an important component of Gandhi’s strategy for the noncooperation movement against British colonial rule in India. (Minault 1982).

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Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 1987. ‘Presidential Address: State Formation in Asia-Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study’. The Journal of Asian Studies 46 (4): 731–46. ———. 2005a. ‘The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World’. Perspective on Politics 3 (1): 5–14. ———. 2005b. ‘Perestroika and Its Other’. In Perestroika: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kirsten Renwick Monroe, 12–20. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rudolph, Susanne H., and Lloyd I. Rudolph. 1980. ‘The Centrist Future of Indian Politics’. Asian Survey 20 (6) (June): 575–94. ———. 1993. ‘Modern Hate: How Ancient Animosities Get Invented’. The New Republic 208 (12) (March 22): 24–9. Rudolph, Susanne H., Lloyd I. Rudolph, and Mohan Singh Kanota. 2002. Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary: A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Sadiq, Kamal. 2005. ‘Lost in Translation: The Challenges of State-Generated Data in Developing Countries’. In Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kristin Monroe, 181–99. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scaff, Lawrence A. 1987. ‘Fleeing the Iron Cage: Politics and Culture in the Thought of Max Weber’. American Political Science Review 81 (3) (September): 737–55. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2002. The Futures of European Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2010. ‘Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously: Explaining Change through Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth “New Institutionalism”.’ European Political Science Review 2 (1): 1–25. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1977. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Turko, Catherine, and Ezra Zuckerman. 2017. ‘Verstehen for Sociology: A Commentary on Watts’. American Journal of Sociology 122 (4) (January): 1272–91. Watts, Duncan J. 2014. ‘Common Sense and Sociology and Sociological Explanations’. American Journal of Sociology 120 (3): 313–51. ———. 2017. ‘Response to Turko and Zuckerman’s Verstehen for Sociology’. American Journal of Sociology 122 (4) (January): 1292–9.

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Weber, Max. 1946. ‘Politics as a Vocation’. In From Max Weber, edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. London: Routledge. ———. 1978. Economy and Society. 2 Vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2001[1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge. Wedeen, Lisa. 2010. ‘Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science’. Annual Review of Political Science 13: 255–72. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan. Yanow, Dvora. 2014. ‘Interpretive Analysis and Comparative Research’. In Comparative Policy Studies: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges, edited by Isabelle Engeli and Christine Rothmayr, 131–59. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Interpretivism in Motion Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth ‘New’ Institutionalism

vivien a. schmidt

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ituated knowledge, a term that Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph used frequently to elucidate their interpretive approach, can work in two ways. It can be seen as a theoretical and methodological commitment to a certain kind of empirical work, but it can also be understood as a meta-theoretical commitment to contextualizing methodological theory—in view of time, place, and interlocutors. The Rudolphs’ interpretive approach, with its emphasis on qualitative methods to gain insights into agents’ ‘situated knowledge’, was developed at a time when major rival approaches were behaviouralist and systemic, with an emphasis on quantitative methods in the search for universal knowledge. Today, the rival approaches to interpretivism are rational choice institutionalism and historical institutionalism, along with quantification and universalism. In this newer context, I have developed an analytic framework that I call ‘discursive institutionalism’. It plays a role in contemporary political science similar to the Rudolphs’ interpretive approach—as a methodological theory that emphasizes qualitative methods to gain insights into agents’ ideas and discursive interactions in an institutional context. My contribution in this chapter will thus elucidate discursive institutionalism even as it shows the deep connections to and influence of the Rudolphs’ seminal interpretive approach.

Vivien A. Schmidt, Interpretivism in Motion: Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth ‘New’ Institutionalism. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/9780190125011.003.0003

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The chapter begins by situating the Rudolphs’ interpretive approach in the debates at its time of origination, from the 1950s to 1970s. This was a particularly intellectually effervescent time with regard to ideas about the nature of explanation in the natural and social sciences as well as about the epistemological underpinnings of knowledge and the problems of relativism. In the first part of this chapter, I set the disciplinary context in which the Rudolphs developed their understanding of situated knowledge, consider what that understanding entailed, and discuss their critique of rival approaches in political science. Next, I explore the debates in the philosophies of science and social science that had a major influence on political scientists at the time, how political scientists responded, and the Rudolphs’ intellectual affinities with the social theorists, philosophers, and social scientists with whom they shared epistemological perspectives. In the last part of the chapter I follow with a discussion of discursive institutionalism, my own updated version of interpretivism, which began as a response to the neo-institutionalist turn in comparative politics and political science more generally that took hold beginning in the 1990s. This is when another round of ‘methodological wars’ in political science began, which pitted rational choice institutionalism against historical institutionalism and sociological institutionalism, while largely sidelining most interpretive approaches—including ‘situated knowledge’ and area studies. Discursive institutionalism has been my own way of promoting the pluralism of methods that the Rudolphs had long advocated while ensuring a place for all interpretive (and historical) studies in political science. But beyond adding a ‘fourth neo-institutionalism’ to political science, discursive institutionalism asks a wider set of epistemological questions about knowledge and interpretation while serving as a bridge to theoretical questions about the nature of power and legitimacy— issues of equal concern to the Rudolphs.

Situating the Rudolphs’ ‘Situated Knowledge’ from the 1950s to 1970s To locate the Rudolphs’ knowledge and the sources of the interpretive approach to ‘situated knowledge’ we need to go back to the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Political science in the post-war era was awash

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with new and different theoretical and methodological approaches to the explanation of politics and society—in particular, systemic and behavioural approaches. In all cases, they rejected the ‘old institutionalism’ that had flourished in previous decades, which studied the formal institutions of government, used a largely descriptive methodology, drew its conceptions of the state from traditional political philosophy and international law, and remained largely atheoretical. Against this, many sought to develop more ‘scientific’ approaches, often influenced by debates in the philosophies of science and social science. At the same time, political scientists themselves were engaged in theoretical debates about how best to explain politics and society. The major approaches were systemic—structural–functional or Marxian and lawlike—behavioural or rational choice. These were countered by historical approaches found in history and more traditional political science as well as by the interpretive approaches of sociology, anthropology, and political science (Ryan 1967; Schmidt 1986, 1988a). The Rudolphs’ interpretive approach to ‘situated knowledge’ was forged largely in opposition to both systemic and behavioural approaches in political science. After having trained and taught as political scientists at Harvard in the heyday of structural-functionalism in the mid- to late 1950s, the Rudolphs moved to Chicago as behaviouralism was taking hold in the 1960s. Fellow faculty members at each institution served as interlocutors for the Rudolphs’ engagement with important social science issues, whether as co-conspirators or as antagonists. Their critiques were theoretical: against the ‘imperialism of categories’ of structural-functional and Marxian approaches, which imposed values and concepts derived from the analysis of more advanced ‘modernized’ polities on less developed ‘traditional’ ones. They were also methodological: against pretensions to ‘objective’ science in favour of ‘subjective’ social science as well as against quantification and reduction in favour of qualitative methods.

Systems Approaches to Explanation in Political Science By the 1950s and 1960s, systemic approaches to political science had superseded the old institutionalism, whether structural-functionalist or other ‘holistic’ approaches, such as Marxian analysis—which had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. In structural-functionalism, the concept

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of the state was replaced by the political system and explained in terms of the equilibrium-seeking functioning of its structural parts—through interest articulation and aggregation (Almond and Powell 1966; Easton 1953). This had an essentially conservative bias in favour of the status quo. Embedded in the approach was the uncritical normative assumption that the system would go on as long as its structures functioned in such a way as to achieve its goal—self-maintenance—and that ‘societies which fulfill the functions more completely are pro tanto better’ (Taylor 1967, 156). Moreover, the system was static in the sense that revolutions were anomalies, unexplainable within the system, and change was absorbed by the system as an instance of ‘homeostatic equilibrium’. Where the approach was linked to a political theory of the state, it picked up on the traditional interest group theory and assumed that the state’s role was to arbitrate among competing interests, with the outcome being the public interest (Dahl 1961a). The counter-theory was the Marxian analysis which, although equally systemic, cast the state as a superstructure in the service of one interest, the bourgeoisie, and saw the system as a whole functioning via class conflict rather than interest competition, with the expected outcome being not self-maintenance but selfdestruction through revolution (Dahrendorf 1959). This approach was clearly also normative in its assumptions but critical of the status quo, as well as socially determinist. The Rudolphs focused their critique-of-systems approaches on modernization theory in particular. This is eloquently laid out in the ‘Imperialism of Categories’ (Rudolph 2005) and exhaustively detailed in The Modernity of Tradition (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). In the essay ‘The Imperialism of Categories’, Susanne Rudolph argued that the concepts used in modernization theory were derived from a ‘Lockean universalism’, rooted in the confluence of structural and functional systems theory, with its ‘central premise and promise, the reproduction of the West through the replication of its stages of growth’. The Rudolphs condemned it for the view that ‘history moved towards a progressive future, in a dialectic or linear fashion’, with dyads organizing the social universe related in a systemic fashion, with modernity on one side and tradition on the other. For the Rudolphs, this not only denied the intermediary ground where the multiple modernities of the East and the West were created, but also misunderstood social change—which

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is incremental and occurs through adaptation, with features of tradition persisting, albeit modified, into modernity (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 107–9). Their ground-breaking Modernity of Tradition was a masterpiece in its ability to show incremental changes over time as tradition adapts to changing needs and circumstances. However, most counter-movements to modernization theory, the Rudolphs insisted, were not much better than the modernization theory itself, because they too were universalistic, whether it was dependency theory, globalization theory, or post-colonial criticism. Area studies was the real counter-movement, focused as it has been on ‘situated knowledge’. But, as the Rudolphs admitted, it has increasingly become ‘a thin, exceptional voice in America’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 111–13). From very early on, the Rudolphs themselves led the counter-movement to universalist approaches to political science. They proposed ‘situated knowledge’ as the best alternative to universal knowledge, because it recognizes the importance of time, place, and circumstances for individuals, and ‘proceeds from specificities and works upward to comparative generalization’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 116). Already in their ‘Surveys in India’ (1958), they demonstrated the importance of situated knowledge by detailing the problematic Anglo-American assumptions of survey approaches in political science, for example, that people are self-aware enough to hold individual opinions (rather than communal); that all opinions are equal; or that a neutral stance is possible (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 3–4). Moreover, in the essay ‘Engaging in Subjective Knowledge’, focused on Amar Singh’s diary narratives, a 30-year project finally published in 2003, the Rudolphs demonstrate that ‘subjective knowledge’ is useful for explaining identity formation and the construction of categories such as race, gender, and class. They convincingly argue that Singh is the ideal participant-observer, part of the culture and society itself but apart from it in terms of his critical stance on and awareness of the anomalies. This was particularly true for his British interlocutors who ‘wonder whether they should read him as a Rajput ruler, an Edwardian officer and gentleman, or an impostor, a black native who does not know his station’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 73). The diary is a first-person account of a ‘subaltern’ in the British Raj, whose voice was not heard because it was silenced or hidden

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from view by patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and class (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 70–1).

Behaviouralism and Rational Choice in Political Science By the 1960s and 1970s, behaviourism—also begun in the 1950s— had for the most part submerged the old institutionalism as well as political systems approaches, becoming the predominant approach in political science, with its focus on individuals and their behaviour (Somit and Tanenhaus 1982). ‘Methodological individualism’ replaced the ‘methodological holism’ of structural-functionalist and Marxian approaches, while the old institutionalism was dismissed as mere description. The behavioural ‘revolution’ sought to explain the ‘phenomena of government in terms of the observed and observable behaviour of men’ (Truman 1951, cited in Dahl 1961b) and rejected the normative biases of both structural-functional and Marxian approaches in favour of ‘objective’ empirical observation, since the political scientist was concerned with ‘what is, as he says, not what ought to be’ (Dahl 1969, 86). In addition, most behaviourists assumed that ‘human and social behaviour can be explained in terms of general laws established by observation’ (Przeworksi and Teune 1970, 4) and sought to develop precise techniques by which to measure data and to demonstrate the validity of law like theories (Kirkpatrick 1971, 71–3). As a result, that which could be most readily quantified—such as voting and public opinion via electoral studies, survey research, and opinion polling—became the focus. Where this was more difficult, rational choice (or public choice) approaches were pioneered using mathematical models drawn from economics—most notably with the work of Anthony Downs (1957). In the meantime, systemic political scientists did not abandon their approaches, but rather added behaviouralism to it. Most systemic political scientists tended to agree with the reductionists that their theories were to be validated according to law like methods, but they nevertheless assumed the systemic approach itself to be justifiable on its own terms (for example, Easton 1953; Dahrendorf 1959, 117; Almond and Powell 1966, 10, 300, 322). The Rudolphs were equally critical of the behavioural turn in political science along with rational choice models. They originally

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developed their arguments about ‘subjective’ social science largely in opposition to the assumptions of behaviouralists in the 1960s. At the time, the apposition was the right one. But given their understanding of ‘situated knowledge’—and especially in light of on-going epistemological debates, discussed later—we would do better to call this ‘intersubjective’ social science. As time went on, the Rudolphs also applied their critiques to the ‘new generations of universalism’. For rational choice in particular, they contended that its ‘disregard for the collective and the particular does more violence than did modernization theory to scholarship that aims to distinguish and characterize cultures and societies’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 110–11). In the essay ‘Perestroika and Its Other’, moreover, Susanne Rudolph offered a systematic contrast between the self-proclaimed ‘scientific mode of inquiry’, represented by rationalist modeling and empiricist causal and statistically probable explanation, and the ‘interpretive mode of inquiry’. While the ‘scientific’ emphasizes certainty, parsimony, cumulative knowledge, causality, singularity of truth, universalism, and objective knowledge, the ‘interpretive’ values contingency, thick description, non-linearity, meaning, multiplicity of truth, contextualism, and subjective knowledge (see discussion in Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 123–8). But for all their critiques of systemic, behavioural, and rationalist modes of explanation, the Rudolphs do not dismiss these or any other approaches completely out of hand. They mainly ask for a place for interpretive approaches. As Lloyd Rudolph indicates by the title of his Perestroika-related essay: ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend’, their intention was to make the case for pluralism and against monopoly (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 130). For the Rudolphs, knowledge is pluralist, and therefore there should even be room ‘for the imaginative truths found in literature, myth, and memory; for the archival truths of history; for the spiritual truths of religions and religious experience; and for the aesthetic truth of the visual and performing arts’. In support, they cite Max Weber’s advocacy of multiple epistemes and diverse forms of knowledge (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 76). And notably, the Rudolphs (2008) themselves use a rich variety of methods to situate knowledge, including class interests, state organization and institutional regularities, cultural frames, as much as communities’ ideas and leaders’ media discourse.

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On a personal note, I should add that the Rudolphs greatly influenced my own intellectual trajectory, both in terms of theoretical and empirical work. The theoretical influences began with my dissertation (with Susanne as chair of the committee). In it, I sought an epistemological justification for methodological pluralism in political science by looking to the philosophy of science and social science. Elements of this investigation much later served as a springboard for discursive institutionalism. The Rudolphs’ empirical influences are equally important, as I too have used a variety of methods to situate knowledge—albeit first in France and then Europe rather than India— in order to explore questions about the role of the state, the nature of capitalism, the impact of neoliberal ideas, and the effects of a supranational ‘state’ (the European Union) on national political economies and democracies.

Debates in the Philosophy of Science and Social Science and Their Implications for Political Science One cannot ‘situate’ the knowledge and development of political science between the 1950s and 1970s without also considering the philosophies of science and social science. These disciplines were equally riven by debates focused on the nature and limits of scientific explanation and its application to the social sciences. Political scientists followed these debates and used them in their own discussions about the nature of political ‘scientific’ explanation. In these years, battles raged over what constituted ‘scientific’ explanation, which criteria established scientific validity, and whether social science could be ‘scientific’ in a manner similar to physics or some other natural science. The philosophy of science itself divided into four rival approaches that mirrored the different approaches to explanation in the social sciences: law like, systemic, historical, and interpretive. Mixed in with divisions over which kinds of explanation were most truly ‘scientific’ were epistemological debates about whether the pursuit of knowledge was based on a truth standard or whether it was success, progress, or creativity that made for scientific validity. The only thing these four approaches held in common was the view that the social sciences could not be sciences at par with natural sciences. The philosophy of social science was equally divided between those who

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believed that social science could indeed emulate law like explanations in science and those who argued instead that it was something entirely different, requiring interpretive and/or historical explanation. These debates had a significant influence on political science, in particular for those political scientists who began pushing for an ‘objective’ political science that was methodologically centred on verification (or falsification) through reduction and quantification; and for those who believed that political science, even if it could not establish truth or even close approximations to it, could be validated via standards of success or progress. But there was also pushback from political scientists who held to more qualitative, interpretive, and historical approaches, more ‘situated’ in culture and time and ‘reflexive’ in terms of agents. The Rudolphs were prominent among this latter group. The main epistemological concern behind all such debates was how to navigate between the Scylla of absolute truths—where universalist generalizations risked imposing an ‘imperialism of categories’ on different cultural and temporal contexts—and the Charybdis of relativism—where no comparisons, let alone generalizations, were possible across cultures or time. Many worried that if there were no rationalist ‘truths’, no ‘objective’ material reality, then there would be no way to protect contextualized (social) ‘scientific’ explanation from the radical relativism of ‘anything goes’, in which power and subjectivity could trump truth and objectivity. But need we necessarily end up with radical relativism if we give up on rationalism grounded in the philosophy of science? The Rudolphs themselves took a middle way through this debate, with their advocacy of multiple truths and their commitment to providing a pluralism of perspectives on reality in order to avoid the twin dangers of imperialist absolutism and radical relativism. This helps explain Lloyd Rudolph’s fondness for Graham Allison’s ‘The Essence of Decision’, in which he sketched out the multiple governmental understandings of the Cuban missile crisis. As argued in the next section, we face these twin dangers mainly if we start with a philosophy of science that goes from ‘particles to people’ rather than with a more society-focused, interpretive philosophy of social science that goes from people to particles. In fact, if we look more closely at how philosophers of science explain science—and mostly physics at that—we can see that they use the four main modes of explanation in the social sciences. Why, then, limit social scientific

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explanation to the law like instead of accepting a pluralism of methods grounded in all four social scientific modes of explanation?1

Debates in the Philosophy of Science The philosophy of science between the 1950s and 1970s was split into four rival theories that mirrored the different approaches to explanation in the social sciences: lawlike, represented by the logical empiricists’ theory of verification of universal laws (for example, Hempel 1965 and Nagel 1961) all the way through to Popper’s (1970) theory of falsification; systemic, epitomized by Kuhn’s (1970) paradigm theory; historical, developed by Stephen Toulmin (1974) in terms of evolutionary ‘disciplinary enterprises’; and interpretive, embodied by Michael Polanyi’s (1958) ‘tacit knowledge’. In addition were the mixes of these approaches, including Lakatos’s (1970) mix of systemic and lawlike in ‘research programmes’, Laudan’s (1977) mix of historical and lawlike in ‘research traditions’, and Feyerabend’s (1981) mix of systemic and interpretive in ‘cosmologies’. But even as each of these approaches in the philosophy of science sought to explain scientific knowledge according to one overall ontology and epistemology, their explanations were based on very different ontological and epistemological premises, and all risked relativism sooner or later. Philosophers of science who used the lawlike framework of analysis—which shares its ideals about the importance of causal or statistically probable explanation with behaviourist and rationalist social scientists—run from logical empiricists such as Carl Hempel (1965) and Ernst Nagel (1961), who insisted that progress towards universalistic knowledge in science proceeds by using methods of verification to establish the absolute truth of lawlike (hypothetico-deductive or deductive-nomological) propositions, through to Karl Popper. Popper’s method of falsification, however, by the time he wrote Logic of Scientific Discovery (1961, 273–6), could only reach a proximity to truth. His method itself became increasingly informal, with science in Conjectures and Refutations (1965, 222) involving ‘progressing from problems to problems’ because every new theory builds on the old, raising new problems while solving old ones, and correcting or contradicting the previous theory where necessary. Finally, by Objective Knowledge (1972, 163–89), Popper’s explanations could take any form

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so long as they solved problems, even if they did not formally reduce to lawlike terms (see discussion in Schmidt 1988a, 176–8). Substituting problem-solving for truth and using the language of falsification even without lawlike explanatory practice emptied the logical empiricist enterprise of much of its substance, promoted a tolerance for many methods so long as they solved problems, and denied behaviourist and rationalist political scientists the ‘scientific’ trump card they had come to take for granted. For behaviourist political scientists, the logical empiricist emphasis on the search for truth through verifiable lawlike generalizations, as per Carl Hempel (1965), fed directly into their own lines of argument. However, they also had a little difficulty moving from an emphasis on logical empiricist verification to Popper’s (1965, 1972) falsification, and then on to Popperian problem-solving. The latter Popper equally left the way open for non-behaviourist political scientists to use the language of falsification and problem-solving as legitimation—or better, as a cover—for their non-reductionist explanations (including systemic, despite the fact that Popper had explicitly rejected it as metaphysics). But Popper’s work also opened the way for methodological pluralism. Interestingly, Gabriel Almond, having followed the behaviourist pied piper in earlier years by adding it to the systemic, insisted by the late 1970s on the need to abandon the exclusive use of lawlike methods in a plea for pluralism because ‘in “good” science, methods are fit to the subject matter rather than subject matter being truncated or distorted in order to fit it to a preordained notion of “scientific method”’ (Almond and Genco 1977). Around the same time, the truth-basis for the lawlike philosophy of science was also being undermined from another side (the following discussion builds on Schmidt 1988a). Thomas Kuhn’s (1962/1970) ‘paradigm’ theory used a systemic framework of analysis, typical of the sociology of Parsonsian equilibrium systems or, better, the Marxian revolutionary theory, to reject the truth claims of logical empiricists. With progress in science based on the revolutionary succession of fully incommensurable paradigms that die under the weight of accumulating anomalies, Kuhn got rid of the Popperian fig leaf altogether with regard to truth and certainty. He substituted a success standard for the truth standard, leaving a radical relativism in which there could be no understanding from one paradigm to the next. Imre Lakatos (1971)

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sought (unsuccessfully) to reapply Popper’s fig leaf by positing overlapping (and, therefore, partially commensurable) research programmes in which a method of ‘sophisticated falsification’ provided a (heuristic) success standard. Larry Laudan (1977) instead turned to a historical framework of analysis while building on Kuhn and Lakatos to similar effect, by identifying overlapping research traditions for which the standard was historical progress (rather than systemic success) through continuities and discontinuities in ideas. But Laudan’s weakness, much as that of Lakatos, came from his attempt to identify ‘objective’ standards that stood outside the ideas of the scientists themselves in order to avoid relativism. Paul Feyerbend (1978), by contrast, plunged wholeheartedly into relativism with his argument that physicists, like witch doctors, construct ‘cosmologies’, and that Popper himself ends up with ‘anything goes’ (Feyerabend 1981, 161). Many behaviouralists jumped onto the Kuhnian or Lakatosian (but not Feyerabend’s) bandwagon, seeing revolutionary change in incommensurable paradigms or incremental change in overlapping research traditions as the way to build a scientific social science. But rather than taking this to mean that they should welcome a pluralism of methods, they began to argue that even if they might no longer have truth on their side, they at least were still the predominant paradigm—as (an earlier) Gabriel Almond (1966) had himself proclaimed in his inaugural address to the APSA, a decade before his conversion to Popperian methodological tolerance. Power and success had replaced truth. Political scientists (although not the Rudolphs) generally missed out on two other approaches in the philosophy of science: historical and interpretive. The historical approach was developed most extensively by Stephen Toulmin (1972), a close friend of the Rudolphs at the University of Chicago (and the main reader of my dissertation). Toulmin consciously modeled his approach on Darwinian biology rather than on physics, despite identifying physics as the ideal ‘compact’ science. Here, ‘disciplinary enterprises’ escape relativism with a standard not of truth or success but rather of historical progress, with the genealogy of disciplinary concepts, problems, procedures, and ideals affected by the extent to which scientists’ intellectual concerns complement or compete with their social concerns over time, leading to disciplinary evolution, extinction, or unchanging continuity (Schmidt 1988b).

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Even earlier than this, we find the interpretive framework of analysis of Michael Polanyi (1958)—also a Rudolph reference. For Polanyi, scientists’ ‘personal knowledge’ informs the often unconscious rules of science which are at the basis of scientific explanation—rather than lawlike propositions, systemic paradigms, or historical enterprises—while the creativity of scientific imagination is the standard of evaluation rather than truth, success, or progress (see Schmidt 1988a, 191–7). This is all about ‘tacit knowledge’ which is developed and carried by ‘succeeding generations of great men’ and networks of scientists in epistemological communities. This approach finds an echo by the 1980s in the works of anthropologists of science such as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (Latour and Woolgar 1986) who track the ‘everyday life’ of the laboratory. In all these approaches, then, the search for standards by which to establish objective truth gave way to relative truth or other standards of evaluation, none of which solved the problem of relativism. This helps explain why more recent philosophers of science have been attracted to ‘critical realism’, which traces its roots back to the ambivalence of Bhaskar (1979) and others, to choose between beliefs in, on the one hand, proximate truths established through standards of empirical verification or falsification of (objective) explanations and, on the other hand, beliefs in relative truths established through standards of evaluation based in the success, progress, and/or creativity of (subjective) ideas. Critical realists, in other words, remained on the fence, trying to reconcile what are essentially irreconcilable approaches grounded in different ontological and epistemological presuppositions. What is the moral of this fourfold story, then? Philosophers of science from the very beginning have had very different approaches to scientific rationality that mirror the four main methods of explanation of the social sciences. This suggests that if we were to look at what philosophers of science do rather than what they say when they explain science, we would see that they use the methodological approaches of the social sciences to explain ‘science’. But if the philosophy of science is applied to social science, and pretty rudimentary social science at that, why should so many political scientists seek to emulate science (poorly), especially since the science in question is itself mostly a stylized and idealized version of physics? They would do better to stop trying to emulate the logical empiricist idealization of physics and get

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on with the task of explaining political reality with as many methods as are appropriate. This is all the more sensible since all four kinds of philosophers of science themselves did not believe that the social sciences could be ‘scientific’ in the manner of natural sciences. Nonetheless, the logical empiricists and Popper still urged social scientists to adopt lawlike approaches so as to reduce all social science propositions to verifiable or falsifiable hypotheses, even if these could never be as good as those of the natural sciences. As for Kuhn, although he left open the possibility that the successful transition to a paradigm-guided social science ‘may well be occurring today’ (1970, 19–21), he insisted that it was a much more difficult transition for social scientists than natural scientists. He argued that this was because social scientists are not as insulated from the concerns of society and often even tend ‘to defend their choice of research problem chiefly in terms of the social importance of achieving a solution’, something that natural scientists never do (1970, 163–4). Toulmin similarly found that the natural sciences had for the most part developed as historically rational, ‘compact’ disciplines with common sets of intellectual concerns and reinforcing social concerns, while the social sciences had not. They were, therefore, hardly rational, ‘wouldbe’ disciplines that could not achieve historical progress because social scientists’ competing social concerns undermined their already vague and often contradictory intellectual concerns (1972, 360, 380). Much like the others, Polanyi found that whereas the interpretive frameworks of all the natural sciences tended to be highly creative, because natural scientists had generally achieved a consensus on how to choose among frameworks and were reinforced in their work by society (1958, 216– 17), the social sciences tended to be much less creative because social scientists could not achieve a consensus on how to choose among interpretive frameworks, nor were they reinforced by society (1958, 203–4). So the question for social scientists and philosophers of social science is whether, given the difficulties of applying the ‘scientific’ reconstructions of philosophers of science to social science, they should even attempt it. And why, in any case, should we apply such approaches developed for ‘particles’ to people? As Fritz Machlup (1969) once noted, ‘if molecules could talk’ we would be in a very different universe indeed. In short, why would social scientists have wanted to subsume their own explanations of social science and society under a much narrower explanatory

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approach focused on science, especially one that philosophers of science themselves insisted applied poorly to social science and society? This question was very much at the core of the Rudolphs’ commitment to a truly ‘social’ science, which starts with society rather than science and focuses first and foremost on human agency and understanding. Such a commitment may help explain why Susanne Rudolph’s main theoretical reference point was Max Weber’s social theory rather than the philosophy of science, and why the Rudolphs mainly valued philosophers of social science who challenged ‘scientistic’ approaches to society.

Debates in the Philosophy of Social Science Many philosophers of social science found the conclusions of philosophers of science—that their approaches did little to explain social science—unsurprising. For such philosophers—in particular, those focused on historical or interpretive approaches to social scientific explanation—the phenomena explained by the social sciences were categorically different from those of the natural sciences. Their focus was on the phenomena of the social sciences per se, and what that meant for a truly ‘social’ science. The basic argument of such philosophers of social science was that the reflexivity of social phenomena—the fact that social scientists are themselves social agents and that social agents can change their behaviour in response to the accounts of their actions—made lawlike explanations modeled on physics inappropriate for the social sciences. As Peter Winch (1958, 127–8) explained it: ‘The concept of war belongs essentially to my behaviour. But the concept of gravity does not belong essentially to the behaviour of a falling apple in the same way: it belongs rather to the physicist’s explanation of the apple’s behaviour’. He argued in the same vein that any attempt to predict behaviour was bound to fail because with the subject matter of interpretive explanation, just as with the historical, we might expect a social agent to act a given way but we cannot predict it in a lawlike sense (1958, 94). This is grounded in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1968: I, 581) insistence that ‘an expectation is embedded in the situation from which it arises’ and, therefore, comes from a calculation involving common sense, not a deduction from some law. It is also at the very basis of the Rudolphs’ interpretivism and their rejection of behaviourism.

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Moreover, against logical empiricist and behaviourist assumptions that reduction does not deny the individuality of actions, only the need to examine them individually (for example, Hempel 1965, 253–4), interpretivists insisted that the words and actions of social agents are both individual and non-reproducible. The only way to understand them, therefore, was in terms of the rules of the culture itself. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1979, 217–18)—another colleague and friend of the Rudolphs at the University of Chicago—suggested in his interpretation of the Balinese cockfight, such understanding required ‘a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves’. For Geertz, comparisons across cultures were certainly possible, but only to ‘define their character in reciprocal relief’ (1979, 223). Additionally, interpretivists found that determinism in lawlike explanation, much as they might have tried to deny it, even carried over to the work of those such as Mancur Olson (1965) or Anthony Downs (1957) who subsumed the interpretive under the lawlike in economic or public choice models and in game theory. By attempting to set the statistical probabilities that political agents will act in one or another of a given set of rational ways, thereby following the pre-established rules of a given economic or political context, rational choice theorists assumed that individual agents were actually bound by those rules and could not, therefore, contrary to Wittgenstein’s (1968: I, 83) suggestions, ‘alter those rules as they go along’ or even ‘create new ones’. In short, when the lawlike model was used to explain social agents’ actions and intentions, the primary subject matter of interpretive explanation, it tended to entail a kind of determinism which contrasted quite sharply with the greater freedom assumed by the interpretive model. In the ‘thick description’ of Clifford Geertz (1973), for example, although social agents may be in a sense determined by their cultural context, they are in another sense its determinants, since they are free if not always willing to try to change it. The interpretive approach of the Rudolphs is very much in tune with interpretive social science, given that in ‘situated knowledge’, at the same time that social agents inherit traditions that structure their lives, they also reconstruct those traditions, adapting them to the needs and desires of their time. This is at the very basis of the Rudolphs’ understanding of the ‘modernity of tradition’. Similarly, (Rudolph and

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Rudolph 2008, 72) what makes the diary of Amar Singh particularly important is that, though the account of an individual, it also reveals the ‘rule-following’, in Wittgenstein’s terms, where ‘a few well-placed informants make it possible to discern that a rule is being followed’. The Rudolphs’ analysis of rule-following shows how this approach can reveal insights on important issues concerning both structure and agency, so as ‘to suggest actors’ subjective knowledge can give us a handle on the politics of identity and category formation’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008, 73). Interpretivists generally considered the difficulties involved in crossnational research to be much greater than what logical empiricists and behavioural social scientists admitted when they insisted that such problems were merely technical, involving the need for better translation, data collection, and interpretation (for example, Nagel 1961, 500). Because interpretive explanations accounted for social agents’ words and actions, which could have very different meanings from one culture to the next, Winch (1958, 35, 51, 119) argued that they could not be subsumed under cross-cultural, statistically probable laws. And to seek to establish such laws, as Alasdair MacIntyre (1967, 175–7, 184) insisted, was therefore to risk imposing social scientists' own set of cultural rules on all other cultures studied by asking questions that make good sense only for their own culture. As Charles Taylor (1979, 34–5) similarly noted, what makes sense in one culture may not make any sense at all in another. We should add here that historical explanation is similarly irreducible to lawlike generalizations. But it is itself different from interpretive explanation, despite the fact that the two often appear together—as they do in the Rudolphs’ own work. Interpretive approaches combine with the historical in studies which, according to the philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood (1969, 214–15), did best because they looked at both the ‘inside’ of events involving individuals’ reasons for action and the ‘outside’ involving the institutions and events which are the context in which individuals’ words and actions must be understood. Other philosophers of history for the most part concurred. For example, W. H. Walsh (1974, 133, 136–7) argued that historical explanations contain ‘colligatory concepts’ which, unlike causal or statistically probable laws, serve to organize by tying together the disparate, sometimes previously unconnected events of history. William Dray (1964, 97–104) added

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that because such concepts account for non-reproducible, often unique events that cannot be subsumed under statistically probable laws, historical explanations cannot be reduced to lawlike terms. Thus, most philosophers of history opposed reductionists such as Patrick Gardiner (1961, 570–1) who saw uniqueness as at best only one aspect of historical events, and an unimportant one at that. They argued, moreover, that because the historical considers patterns of development over time, it can expect certain things to happen but will not predict them. And its ‘causes’, when discussed in narrative history, for example, are connected to one another in a chain of events that is not causal in any law like sense (Dray 1964, 97–104). Finally, as philosopher Michael Scriven (1959, 464–6) suggested, even lawlike testing of historical generalization, would yield very little, since historical generalizations are for the most part truisms, and will either be false if they fit the lawlike model, or true but trivial, and therefore inadequately general. But if all explanation is so culturally and temporally contextualized, critics might ask: how can interpretive or historical explanation avoid relativism? The response from interpretive and historical philosophers of social science is that relativism is not such a problem because translation is always possible across cultures, reinterpretation across time. Thus, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre (1977, 464) sees change in ‘dramatic narratives’, or our normal way of interpreting the world, as rationally based because the new always incorporates an understanding of the old. If epistemological crisis results from radical doubts about our dramatic narrative, crisis resolution comes, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with the ‘construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them’ (MacIntyre 1977, 455). In science as much as social science, MacIntyre (1977, 465–6) argues that the creation of a new narrative does not obliterate the old—as in Kuhn’s paradigms—but rather rewrites it, explaining the failure of the old narrative as part of its new interpretation of the world. Contra Polanyi, moreover, MacIntyre (1977, 461–5) argues against seeing ‘every man his own Galileo’ because a scientific genius such as Galileo comes at a moment of crisis in the tradition, and achieves ‘not only a new way of understanding nature, but also and inseparably a new way of understanding the old science’s way of understanding nature’.

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Finally, in order to get a clearer sense of the differences between knowledge and certainty in science versus social science, I have found illuminating the later Wittgenstein’s (1972) little-noticed distinction in On Certainty between language-games based on our experience and those based on our pictures of the world (Schmidt 2008, 2012). Languagegames based in our everyday experiences in the world are generally very certain, since they ordinarily admit of no doubts and mistakes—such as knowledge of one’s own name and address, of the number of one’s hands and toes, and of the meanings of the words one uses. By contrast, language-games based in our pictures of the world often follow from our (social) scientific interpretations of the world—such as belief in the existence of the earth one hundred years ago, in the events of history, in the temperature at which water boils, or, say, in the materialist incentives structures that determine economic behaviour. These always allow for doubts, mistakes, and even gestalt switches or radical conversions, even though some such picture-games may also allow for much less doubt because they sit at the ‘foundation’ of our picture of the world, as part of the very ‘scaffolding’ of our thoughts (Wittgenstein 1972, 211, 234; Schmidt 2008, 318–19; and Schmidt 2012, 97–100). This distinction between matters that have to do with our experiences of everyday life and those involving our pictures of the world suggests that social scientists’ explanations have different kinds as well as degrees of certainty, depending on their objects of inquiry. In the social sciences, approaches based in historical and interpretive explanation such as the Rudolphs’ tend to be closer to everyday experience in terms of the phenomena they seek to explain than the more systemic and lawlike explanations that are often closer to picture games. In interpretive and historical explanation, the ‘facts’ about agents’ experiences are usually not in dispute (at least until the advent of ‘post-truth’ politics) even if the interpretations may be, and agreement on the facts is not likely to change radically even if there may be some question about which facts to take into account in the interpretation of events. By contrast, the ‘facts’ involving agents’ pictures of the world, say, deduced through the mathematical models of economists—with their pictures of rational actors in the business of rationally calculating their interests in order to maximize their utility—can be upended, in particular when the models fail to predict, as in the massive financial market crash of 2007–8 (Schmidt 2012, 98–9). That said, deep structures of

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meaning matter such as the ideas at the foundations of our understanding of the economic world continue, which helps explain why neoliberalism has remained resilient over time (Schmidt and Thatcher 2013; Schmidt 2016). Even in the natural sciences, moreover, we can differentiate between knowledge based on pictures of the world and those closer to everyday experience. For example, changes in the theories of physics—say, from Newtonian mechanics to Einsteinian relativity—are very different from those in natural history—say between Linnaeus and Darwin. Whereas in physics the very nature of the phenomena described may change— from the ‘elements’ of the Greeks to subatomic particles—much as in Kuhn’s (1970) duck-rabbit picture (first you see a duck, then a rabbit), they do not in natural history. An eagle remains an eagle for Darwin and Linnaeus. Only if we went from seeing an eagle perched on a cliff to a ‘cleagle’, with the eagle inseparable from the cliff, could the change in the perception of the phenomena be similar (Schmidt 1988a, 184–5, 2012). Knowledge and certainty in the sciences as much as the social sciences, then, depend upon the extent to which the phenomena under consideration are available to social agents, whether as matters of their experience or as part of their pictures of the world. And the more everyday the action, the more certain the understanding, but arguably the more difficult the job of persuasion if the goal is radical change—given the hold of tradition and ‘situated knowledge’, which are likely to make adaptation and incrementalism the main dynamic for change.

Updating Interpretivism via Discursive Institutionalism By the 1980s, political science had moved on. The philosophy of science and social science were no longer of interest to political scientists who had absorbed as much of the lessons as they saw fit. Some continued to believe in ‘science’ and the ‘truth-based’ nature of law like explanation, or at least in the need to develop universal generalizations based in rigorous causal models and statistically probable correlations via quantitative analysis. Many forgot the lessons of Kuhn, or never even learned them, whereas others assumed, following Kuhn, that whichever approach became predominant was correct by definition, because there was no other truth than that of success or usefulness, as decided by the scientific community itself.

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In political science today, interpretivism still lives on, with many vigorous defenders. But it has become a minority sport, as has area studies. Since the 1990s, the methodological wars pitted other groups of scholars against one another. These consist of the ‘new institutionalists’: mainly the rational choice institutionalists—focused on rationalist logics, formal models and causal or statistically probable explanations—versus the historical institutionalists—concerned with logics of path dependencies, rules, and regularities—and even the sociological institutionalists— centred on logics of appropriateness, cultural frames, and norms. There are of course still self-defined ‘interpretivists’ out there, especially in area studies, public policy, and political theory, writing articles, books, and handbooks. But the field of comparative politics, and indeed, political science more generally, has changed the terms of debate, with the focus now on the different kinds of ‘neo-institutionalisms’ of various sorts. In joining in this debate through the invention of a ‘fourth’ new institutionalism that I have called ‘discursive institutionalism’, I have been ‘adapting’ the tradition of interpretivism to current preoccupations. By focusing in on the substantive content of ideas and the dynamics of discursive interaction in institutional context, discursive institutionalism builds on interpretivism at the same time that it is in dialogue with the other neo-institutionalisms. But beyond this, discursive institutionalism connects to other disciplines and theories as well, drawing on linguistics and philosophy, behavioural economics and psychology, anthropology and sociology, postmodernism and post-structuralism, policy analysis and communications studies, and more. As such, it seeks to constitute a broader field of inquiry that brings together all scholars concerned with ideas and discourse. With regard to political analysis in particular, moreover, discursive institutionalism is concerned not only with defining the different sorts of ideas and spheres of discursive interaction but also with exploring the ideational sources of power and legitimacy as well as the discursive dynamics of change, whether following from elite leadership or citizen mobilization.

From the Three Older New Institutionalisms to Discursive Institutionalism ‘New institutionalism’ has its roots in the 1980s and 1990s, with the desire by a wide range of scholars to bring institutions back into the

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explanation of political action. It was less focused on rejecting the ‘old institutionalism’ than on providing a counter to behaviourism. ‘New institutionalism’ was a response to the absence of institutional analysis, or of considering collective action as collective through composite or institutional actors. It rejected the reduction of political action to its methodological individualist parts, opposing the proposition that observable behaviour was the basic datum of political analysis; that observation of political behaviour reveals actors’ preferences; that aggregating preferences explains collective decisions; and that collective decisions equal the public interest (Immergut 1998, 6–8). In addition, these new institutionalists rejected all systemic approaches, including Marxian, with their a priori standards of justice based on predetermined ‘objective’ interests such as class, gender, or social position (Immergut 1998, 11). But while these new institutionalists have been united on the importance of institutions and in the rejection of behaviourism and systemic approaches, they have been divided along a number of other dimensions. These include their definition of institutions, their objects and logics of explanation, and the ways in which they deal with change. The battle lines were mainly drawn between ‘rational choice institutionalism’ and ‘historical institutionalism’, with ‘sociological institutionalism’ a distant third (for more detail, see Schmidt 2008, 2010)—and interpretivism not even a contender. Moreover, methodological pluralism was ruled out from the start, as the battle lines were drawn between approaches, even if later there was the occasional ceasefire or attempts at reconciliation or combination of approaches (for example, Grief and Laitin 2004; Katznelson and Weingast 2005). Briefly defined, rational choice institutionalism focuses on rational actors who pursue their preferences following a ‘logic of calculation’ within political institutions, defined as structures of incentives. Historical institutionalism instead details the development of political institutions, described as regularized patterns and routinized practices, which are the (often unintended) outcomes of purposeful choices and historically unique initial conditions in a ‘logic of path-dependence’. Sociological institutionalism sees political institutions as socially constituted and culturally framed, with political agents acting according to a ‘logic of appropriateness’ that follows from culturally specific rules and norms. In contrast to these three institutionalisms, discursive

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institutionalism considers the ideas and discourse that actors use to devise, deliberate, contest, and/or legitimize political action in their ‘meaning’ context according to a ‘logic of communication’. Of the three older new institutionalisms, rational choice institutionalism seeks to establish the most universal of generalizations, by positing rational actors with fixed preferences who calculate strategically to maximize those preferences and who, in the absence of institutions that promote complementary behaviour through coordination, confront collective action problems (Ostrom 1990). This deductive approach to explanation makes it good at capturing the range of reasons actors might normally have for an action, but its universal claims about rationality along with its deductive approach to explanation means that it risks overgeneralizing and has difficulty explaining any anomalies that depart radically from interest-motivated action, an individual’s reasons for action, or real political events (Green and Shapiro l994). Moreover, it can appear deterministic, as individuals are predicted to respond in a limited number of expected ways to external incentive structures (Immergut 1998, 14). Finally, because rational choice institutionalism assumes fixed preferences and is focused on equilibrium conditions, it has difficulty explaining why institutions change over time, especially given the lack of concern with the origins and formation of preferences (see Green and Shapiro 1994; Blyth 1997). Historical institutionalism avoids some of the problems of rational choice institutionalism by focusing on the actual institutions, or ‘macrostructures’, in which political action occurs (Steinmo et al. 1992). It emphasizes not just the operation and development of institutions but also the path dependencies and unintended consequences that result from such historical development (Hall and Taylor 1996, 938; Steinmo et al. 1992; Thelen 1999; Pierson 2000). However, by emphasizing the structures and processes much more than the events out of which they are constructed, let alone the individuals whose actions and interests spurred those events, historical institutionalism lacks the ‘micro-foundational logic’ present in rational choice institutionalism. Change is largely described (rather than explained) from the outside (exogenously), whether by way of ‘big bang’ theories about critical junctures (for example, Gourevitch 1986) or by path dependencies with lock-in mechanisms and positive feedback effects (Pierson 2000). As a result, historical institutionalism can appear historically deterministic

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or even mechanistic where it focuses exclusively on continuities and path dependencies. Even recent attempts to put more history back into historical institutionalism, by focusing on incremental change through processes of drift, layering, and conversion (Streeck and Thelen 2005), do more to describe change from the outside than to explain it from the inside, through agency. Sociological institutionalism focuses on agents who act within cultural institutions that consist of the norms, cognitive frames, and meaning systems that guide human action. Such cultural institutions constitute the setting within which purposive, goal-oriented action is deemed ‘appropriate’, such that rationality is socially constructed and culturally and historically contingent (March and Olsen 1989; DiMaggio and Powell 1991). Because sociological institutionalist explanations are arrived at inductively rather than deductively, they can lend insight into individuals’ reasons for action in ways that rational choice institutionalism cannot. Moreover, because such explanations account contextually for individuals’ reasons for action, sociological institutionalism is better able to explain the events out of which historical institutional explanations are constructed. Finally, rather than appearing either economically or historically deterministic, sociological institutionalism can appear culturally deterministic where it emphasizes the cultural routines and rituals to the exclusion of individual action which breaks out of the cultural norm. Like the rational choice approach, it too can be too static or equilibriumfocused, and unable to account for change over time. This said, where sociological institutionalists emphasize rule-creation and change, they could be categorized just as readily as discursive institutionalists, much like scholars in the historical institutionalist and rational choice institutionalist traditions who have come to focus on the role of ideas and discursive interaction, say, in the recalculation of interests, reshaping of historical paths, or the reframing of culture. In fact, it is important to note that some scholars in the three older institutionalisms, concerned with the deterministic and static aspects of their approaches have straddled the divide with discursive institutionalism. There are relatively few in rational choice institutionalism, where the foray into ideas was short-lived because it may have appeared ‘a bridge too far’ (Blyth 2002, 2003), although there are notable exceptions (for example, Rothstein 2005). But there are many in historical

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institutionalism, since from the very beginning it encompassed scholars whom we now would see as discursive institutionalists (for example, Desmond King, Margaret Weir, and Sheri Berman). Historical institutionalism largely cast them out as it moved closer to rational choice institutionalism over time, as material perspectives came to predominate over the more ideational. As for sociological institutionalism, much depends upon whether scholars see ideas mainly as static ideational structures, as norms and identities constituted by culture (for example, Katzenstein et al. 1996) or present ideas as more dynamic, that is, as norms, frames, and narratives that not only establish how actors conceptualize the world but also enable them to reconceptualize the world, serving as a resource to promote change (for example, Finnemore 1996). What defines discursive institutionalists is the focus on ideas as explanatory of change, often with a demonstration that such ideas do not fit predictable ‘rationalist’ interests, are underdetermined by structural factors, and/or represent a break with historical paths and/or cultural frames (see discussion in Blyth 2003; see also Schmidt 2008, 2010). But importantly, discursive institutionalism remains open to a pluralism of methods, as noted earlier. For example, in my book, The Futures of European Capitalism (2002), I begin with a soft rational choice approach together with historical institutionalism to show that rather than converging on a single neoliberal model of capitalism or splitting into a liberal market economy modeled on the UK and a coordinated market economy modeled on Germany, Europe continues to have at least three varieties of capitalism, with a stateinfluenced market economy modeled on France as another variety in its own right. But I then explain both the continued variation as well as the liberalizing changes of these three countries using discursive institutionalism in order to highlight the importance of ideational leadership and discursive persuasion in the politics of adjustment. In another book, Democracy in Europe (2006), I begin with a historical institutionalist analysis showing that the ‘highly compound’ European Union has a more disruptive impact on ‘simple’ polities like Britain and France than more compound polities such as Germany and Italy. But I then turn to discursive institutionalism to demonstrate that institutions are not destiny. The presence or absence of legitimating ideas and discourse about the EU-related changes to the traditional

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workings of national democracy better explain countries’ differential responses to Europe’s perceived ‘democratic deficit’, in particular in the UK and France. The recent experiences of the Brexit vote in the UK versus the election of the pro-European President Macron in France are further cases in point.

Defining Discursive Institutionalism Discursive institutionalism is an analytic framework which gives a name to the very rich and diverse set of ways of explaining political and social reality that are focused on the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse in institutional context (see Schmidt 2002, Chapter 5; 2006, Chapter 5; 2008; 2010; see also Campbell and Pederson 2001). As such, it calls attention to the significance of approaches that theorize about ideas and discourse in their many different forms, types, and levels as well as in the interactive processes of policy coordination and political communication by which ideas and discourse are generated, articulated, and contested by ‘sentient’ (thinking, speaking, and acting) agents. My initial purpose in developing what is essentially an umbrella concept for a highly disparate set of ideational and discursive approaches coming from very different traditions has been two-fold: First, I have sought to constitute a ‘field’ or discursive sphere within which practitioners coming from very different epistemological, ontological, and methodological vantage-points can discuss, deliberate, argue, and contest one another’s ideas about ideas and discursive interaction. Importantly, this very open definition of discursive institutionalism as a major field also has allowed me to set out my own distinct set of epistemological and ontological predispositions. Second, I have sought to demonstrate to political scientists in particular that discursive institutionalism represents a fourth neo-institutionalism which does a much better job than rational choice institutionalist interest-based logics, historical institutionalist rules-based path dependencies, or even sociological institutionalist culture-based frames in helping to explain the dynamics of institutional change (see Schmidt 2008, 2010, 2012). But what started as a response to neo-institutionalism, in an attempt to create space for interpretivism, has moved far beyond this to address major questions about politics and society, including the

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epistemological foundations of human knowledge and action and the theoretical bases of power and legitimacy. Discursive institutionalism is open to a wide range of approaches focused on ideas—such as the ‘ideational turn’ (Blyth 1997) or ‘ideational constructivism’ (Hay 2006)—as well as on discourse—including post-modernist and post-structuralist approaches (those building on Foucault, Bourdieu, or Laclau and Mouffe). The ideas themselves come in many different forms. They may be cast as strategic weapons in the battle for control (Blyth 2002); ‘frames’ that provide guideposts for knowledge, analysis, persuasion, and action through ‘frame-reflective discourse’ (Rein and Schön 1991); narratives or discourses that shape understandings of events (for example, Roe l994); ‘storytelling’ to clarify practical rationality (Forester 1993); ‘collective memories’ that frame action (Rothstein 2005); discursive ‘practices’ or fields of ideas that define the range of imaginable action (Bourdieu 1994; Howarth, Norval, and Stavrakakis 2000); or ‘argumentative practices’ at the centre of the policy process (Fischer and Forester 1993). Here, we could add what Kristen Monroe (Chapter 4 of this volume) calls narratives or stories that appeal to the moral imagination. Such ideas may come at different levels of generality, as policies, programmes, and philosophies. The first level of ideas encompasses the specific policies or ‘policy solutions’ proposed by policymakers for debate and adoption. The second level includes the more general programmes that underpin the policy ideas, which define the problems to be solved by the policies, the issues to be considered, the goals to be achieved, the norms, methods and instruments to be applied, and the objectives and ideals. These may be cast as ‘paradigms’ that reflect the underlying assumptions or organizing principles orienting policy (Hall 1993; Schmidt 2002, Chapter 5); ‘programmatic beliefs’ (Berman 1998) that operate in the space between worldviews and specific policy ideas; ‘policy cores’ which provide sets of diagnostics and prescriptions for action (Sabatier and Jenkins 1993); or ‘problem definitions’ that set the scope of possible solutions to the problems that policy ideas address (Mehta 2011). At an even more basic or deeper level of ideas are the ‘public philosophies’ (Campbell 1998), ‘public sentiments’ (Campbell 2004), ‘deep core’ (Sabatier and Jenkins 1993); world views and ‘Weltanschauung’ which frame the policies and programmes with a deeper core of organizing ideas, values, and principles of knowledge

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and society. These therefore often constitute the ‘background ideas’ to programmes and policies (Schmidt 2016). Policies, programmes, and philosophies tend to contain two types of ideas: cognitive and normative. Cognitive ideas elucidate ‘what is and what to do’, normative ideas, ‘what is good or bad about what is’ in light of ‘what one ought to do’. Cognitive ideas speak to how (first level) policies offer solutions to the problems at hand, how (second level) programmes define the problems to be solved and identify the methods by which to solve them, and how both policies and programmes mesh with the deeper core of (third level) principles and norms of relevant scientific disciplines or technical practices (see Hall 1993; Schmidt 2002, 2008). Normative ideas instead attach values to political action, and serve to legitimize the policies in a programme through reference to their appropriateness (see March and Olsen 1989). They speak to how (first level) policies meet the aspirations and ideals of the general public and how (second level) programmes as well as (first level) policies resonate with a deeper core of (third level) principles and norms of public life, whether the newly-emerging values of a society or the long-standing ones in the societal repertoire (Schmidt 2000, 2002, Chapter 5). Discourse encompasses not just the representation or embodiment of ideas but also the interactive processes of coordination by and through which ideas are generated in the policy sphere by discursive policy communities and entrepreneurs and communicated, deliberated, and/ or contested in the political sphere by political leaders, social movements, and the public. In the policy sphere, the ‘coordinative discourse’ consists of the individuals and groups at the centre of policy construction who are involved in the creation, elaboration, and justification of policy and programmatic ideas. These are the policy actors—the civil servants, elected officials, experts, organized interests, and activists, among others—who seek to coordinate agreement among themselves on policy ideas. They may do in a variety of ways in a wide range of venues, whether in loosely connected ‘epistemic communities’ that share cognitive and normative ideas about a common policy enterprise (Haas 1992); closely connected ‘advocacy coalitions’ that share ideas and access to policymaking (Sabatier and Jenkins 1993); ‘discourse coalitions’ that share ideas over extended periods of time (Hajer 1993); or expert networks of actors who share ideas and technical expertise (Seabrooke and Tsingou 2014). But the coordinative discourse may also

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contain individuals who, as ‘entrepreneurs’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998) serve as catalysts for change as they draw on and articulate the ideas of discursive communities and coalitions. In the political sphere, the ‘communicative discourse’ consists of the individuals and groups at the centre of political communication involved in the presentation, deliberation, and legitimization of political ideas to the general public. These consist of political actors who, as political leaders, government spokespeople, party activists, ‘spin doctors’, and more, communicate the policy ideas and programmes developed in the context of the coordinative discourse to the public for discussion and deliberation in a mass process of public persuasion (see, for example, Mutz, Sniderman, and Brody l996). But it encompasses other political actors as well, including members of opposition parties, the media, pundits, community leaders, social activists, public intellectuals, experts, think-tanks, organized interests, and social movements, among others who, often organized in the ‘policy forums’ of ‘informed publics’ (Rein and Schön 1991) and the ‘public of organized private persons’ (Habermas 1989), communicate their responses to government policies, engendering debate, deliberation, and ideally, modification of the policies under discussion. Finally, the general public of citizens and voters to whom this communicative discourse is directed also contribute to it. They may do so as members of civil society, through grass-roots organizing, social mobilization, and demonstrations, as members of ‘mini-publics’ in citizen juries, issues forums, deliberative polls, and the like (see Goodin and Dryzek 2006), or as members of the electorate, whose voices are heard as the subjects of opinion polls, surveys, focus groups, as well as, of course, as voters—where actions speak even louder than words. The directional arrows of these discursive interactions may be top to top among political and/or technical elites, top down through the influence of elites, or bottom up via civil society, social-movement activists, or ordinary people. Most frequently, the arrows of discursive interaction appear to be going from top down, as policy elites generate ideas in different policy sectors which political elites then communicate to the public—often weaving them together into a ‘master’ discourse which presents an (at least seemingly) coherent political programme that provides a ‘vision’ of where the polity is, where it is going, and where it ought to go—after which they ‘mediate’ the ensuing public debates.

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There is an extensive literature, in fact on how elites shape mass public opinion by establishing the terms of the discourse and by framing the issues for the mass media and, thereby, for the mass public more generally (for example, Zaller 1992). The arrows can also go from bottom up, however, in the discursive interactions of social activists, feminists, and environmentalists in national and international arenas (for example, Keck and Sikkink 1998; Epstein 2008). The arrows can even remain solely at the level of civil society, in ‘public conversations’ (Benhabib 1996), communicative action in the ‘public sphere’ (Habermas 1989), or ‘deliberative democracy’ in the supranational sphere (Dryzek 2000). The Rudolphs’ work on Gandhi’s charismatic leadership is a very good example of how bottom up mass social mobilization can be spurred through innovative ideas conveyed through the inspiring discourse of an exceptional leader. Institutional Context in Discursive Institutionalism The institutional context is equally important for discursive interactions. But it can be understood in two ways: first, in terms of the meaning context in which agents’ discursive interactions proceed following nationally situated logics of communication; second, in terms of the formalized as well as informal institutions that inform their ideas, arguments, and discursive interactions (Schmidt 2008, 2010). The institutions in the first sense of institutional context are akin to what the Rudolphs saw as ‘situated knowledge’. They are above all dynamic, as structures and constructs of meaning internal to ‘sentient’ (thinking and speaking) agents whose ‘background ideational abilities’ enable them to create (and maintain) institutions (building on Searle but also Bourdieu, Foucault, and more) at the same time that their ‘foreground discursive abilities’ enable them to communicate critically about those institutions (building on Habermas, Gramsci, and more) so as to engage in collective discourse and action to change (or maintain) them (Schmidt 2008, 2012). This, then, is a fully interpretive approach to institutions, which emphasizes not only agents’ ‘situated knowledge’ as part of the ‘structuring’ capacities of culture but also their active engagement with the world, as agents’ ability to ‘(re)construct’ their world as they think, speak, and act collectively to adapt it to their needs and desires. This discussion also creates a bridge with more psychological

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understandings of individual moral action and cognition, as elaborated by Kristen Monroe (Chapter 4 of this volume), where the moral imagination can be seen as developed through agents’ ‘foreground discursive abilities’ while moral salience and the nature of moral imagination are shaped by their ‘background ideational abilities’. Institutions in the second sense are the formal (or informal) ones that are generally the objects of explanation of the three older neoinstitutionalisms, including the rationalist incentive structures, historical rules, or cultural frames that serve as external constraints to agents’ action. In discursive institutionalism, these kinds of institutions may be treated either as unproblematic background information—for example, as the formal institutional context that shapes discursive interactions or the social norms that remain unquestioned as ideas—or they may themselves be the objects of inquiry, for example, to investigate how agents’ changing ideas may (re)construct interests or how their discourse is key to understanding change during critical junctures. Agents’ ideas, discourse, and actions in any institutional context, however, must also be seen as responses to the material (and not so material) realities which affect them—including material events and pressures, the unintended consequences of their own actions, the actions of others, the ideas and discourse that seek to make sense of any such actions, as well as the structural frameworks of power and position. But this raises a further set of epistemological questions with regard to what we can know about the world with any certainty. For if everything is related to ideas and discourse, with no ‘neutral incentive structures’ or ‘objective’ and ‘material’ interests, how can one avoid falling into some sort of extreme idealism or relativism, in which one can’t know anything for certain, because the world is radically uncertain or even immaterial? The answer is that discursive institutionalism assumes the existence of material reality, but it opposes the (rationalist) conflation of material reality and interests into ‘material interests’. Material reality is, rather, the setting within which or in response to which agents may conceive of their interests (Schmidt 2008, 2012). And to understand that setting, we need to also consider the material conditions in which people live, the structural forces that may be at work, the formal and informal institutional rules that people may follow, and naturally the unpredictable events that affect peoples’ lives because, after all, ‘stuff happens’. Material reality encompasses, in other words, very much the

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same elements that affect agents in the Rudolphs’ interpretive approach to ‘situated knowledge’. But what, then, is material reality or, better, what is ‘real’ even if it is not ‘material’? Searle (1995) is once again useful, in this case for his differentiation between ‘brute facts’—which, like mountains, are material because they exist regardless of whether sentient agents acknowledge their existence—and ‘social facts’, of which ‘institutional facts’ are a subset. Institutions are not material because they don’t exist without sentient agents, but they are real to the extent that the collective agreements by which they were established continue to hold and, like the institution of property or of money, are real and have causal effects (Schmidt 2008, 318; 2012, 96–7). Such social facts and institutions have been the focus of the Rudolphs’ work in so many different ways, including in terms of the effects of colonialism, the nature of domination and subjection, along with the possible split in perceptions of identity, or who is seen as a ‘subaltern’, as in the case of Amar Singh. The Power of Ideas/Discourse Our final question is how to relate power to ideas and discursive interactions in discursive institutionalism. This is not such an easy task, mainly because many of the approaches that generally fit under the discursive institutionalist umbrella do not theorize power, but instead simply state that ideas have power (for example, Kingdon 1984; Campbell 1998; Cox 2001; Blyth 2002). The problem here, as a result, is that with few exceptions (notably Béland 2010), the matter of how ideas have power remains under-theorized and under-investigated. In contrast, post-structuralists such as Foucault (2000), Gramsci (1971), and Laclau and Mouffe (1985) put power at the centre of their understanding of ideas, be it as discursive formations, hegemony, ideology, or the production of subjectivity. The problem here is that power and discourse are often so intermingled that any empirical discourse analysis is imbued with the theoretical focus on domination by elites, such that investigation centres on how elite ideas control the ways in which people come to think about politics and society. For political scientists who do not start with these premises (although they might end with them as conclusions), embedding substantive theory about power relations in the methodology risks over-determining the results.

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Lately, in conjunction with Martin Carstensen, I have developed a systematic theorization of discursive institutionalist scholars’ approaches to ideational power that seeks to set these approaches, among others, in perspective (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016). Drawing on both existing ideational scholarship and the larger power debate in political science (focused mainly on coercive, structural, and institutional power—the focus of the other three neo-institutionalist approaches), we define ideational power as the capacity of actors (whether individual or collective) to influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs through the use of ideational elements. We note that acts of ideational power—whether successful or not—occur in only a subset of the relations relevant for understanding how ideas matter, namely when actors seek to influence the beliefs of others by promoting their own ideas at the expense of others’. In this view, ideational power has certain distinguishing features. First, it is exerted through the constitution of intersubjective meaning structures that agents both draw on, to give meaning to their material and social circumstances, and battle over, to affect which ideas and discourses are deemed viable. Second, ideational power is conceived as both a top-down and a bottom-up process. That is, ideational power takes seriously not only the discursive struggles occurring among policy actors at the top of the power hierarchy but also those related to the effort of political actors at the bottom to get their ideas across to the general public. This contrasts with the singular focus on topdown interaction generally characterizing the coercive, structural, and institutional understandings of power in rational choice, historical, and sociological institutionalism (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016, 321–2). With this in mind, we have identified three ways of theorizing about the power of ideas and discourse. These include looking for persuasive power through ideas via discourse, looking for coercive power over ideas and discourse, and looking for structural or institutional power in ideas and discourse. Power through ideas is the most common approach to ideational power among discursive institutionalists. It consists of the capacity of actors to persuade other actors of the cognitive validity and/or normative value of their views of what they should think and do through the use of ideational elements. They tend to do this via discourses that serve to explain and/or legitimate their proposals and actions, whether

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in coordination with other policy actors (coordinative discourse) or in communication with the public (communicative discourse). This is not necessarily a completely ‘rational’ process in the sense that the most powerful necessarily are the ones with the ‘best’ argument. Instead, the persuasiveness of an idea depends on both the cognitive and normative arguments that can be mustered in its support. In this view, ideational power is not primarily about manipulating people into not recognizing their ‘real interests’ (Lukes 1974), but rather about persuading other agents to accept one’s understanding of an issue based on available intersubjectively held ideas (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016, 323–6). Power over ideas is the capacity of actors to control and dominate the meaning of ideas either directly, by imposing their ideas on others, or indirectly, whether through shaming opponents into conformity or by resisting alternative interpretations. This version of ideational power connects with more coercive forms of power, since here the beliefs of others are directly disregarded. It is the most common approach to ideational power taken by scholars who see this power as the capacity of actors who control most of the levers of traditional power—coercive, structural, and/or institutional—to therefore also promote their own ideas to the exclusion of all others. However, power over ideas can alternatively be seen as the coercive power of actors who are usually powerless in the sense that they enjoy little access to coercive, institutional, and structural forms of power, but who, by the use of discursive means, are able to shame otherwise powerful actors to act in ways they would not otherwise have done—as in the case of progressive social movements (for example, Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Epstein 2008). Finally, power over ideas can manifest itself in the ability of actors who are normally quite powerful in terms of institutional position and authority to, themselves, not listen to alternative ideas—as with many economists in the neoliberal era (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016, 326–8). Power in ideas focuses on the authority certain ideas enjoy in structuring thought at the expense of other ideas. This power can be seen as structural or institutional. Structural power in ideas results from agents having established hegemony over the production of subject positions, and is generally the focus of post-structuralists such as Foucault or Bourdieu. Institutional power in ideas is a consequence of institutions imposing constraints on which ideas agents may take into consideration, and is mostly the domain of historical institutionalists.

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While the other forms of ideational power generally concentrate on the interactions between ideational agents, power in ideas mostly concerns the deeper-level ideational and institutional structures that actors draw upon and relate their ideas to in order for them to gain recognition from elites and the mass public (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016, 329–31). What is particularly interesting about power in ideas is that it can be seen as even more ‘powerful’ in some sense than coercive or structural power. While coercive power forces agents to do what they might not want to do, agents may at least be aware of this domination, like it or not. In the case of Foucault’s (2000) structuring ideas, by contrast, the ideational structure dominates not just what agents do but also what they think and say, while for Bourdieu (1994), the doxa or vision of the world of elites who dominate the state creates the habitus that conditions people to see the world in the way they (the dominant) choose (Carstensen and Schmidt 2016, 331). Susanne Rudolph (2009) provided an illustration of how this kind of structuring power in ideas is also influenced by coercive power over ideas and persuasive power through ideas. The illustration in question involves the explanation of the British East India Company’s shift in the nineteenth century away from a conceptualization of Indians as ‘civilized’, and therefore worthy of a certain measure of autonomy and self-governing capacity, to one in which Indians were portrayed as hardly civilized at all, as primitive. One could offer a rational choice institutionalist account of this in terms of coercive power and material interest, by noting the instrumental manner in which these new ideas became the interest-based rationale for dispossessing the Indians of their power by a new group in the East India Company. But this is to suggest that all were aware of what they were doing. Rather, for the vast majority of British actors, the shift in conceptualization was an exercise of power over ideas, imposed by a new group, that turned into power in ideas for subsequent colonists, as they developed a whole new way of seeing Indians, structuring their thoughts about India, which changed politics in the UK and power relations in India. It would take another hundred years before Gandhi would force those in power to listen (power over ideas), through his persuasive power through ideas to mobilize fellow Indians to engage in the everyday practices of nonviolent resistance (Schmidt 2011).

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In sum, with these three ways of dealing with the power of ideas, it is important to reiterate that discursive institutionalism is an umbrella concept that constitutes a wide field, with many different approaches to ideas and discourse, which is methodologically pluralist within its analytic framework, as well as in relation to other neo-institutionalist frameworks. As such, it can accommodate all three forms of ideational power: my own particular focus on persuasive power through ideas along with post-structuralist, sociological institutionalist, or historical institutionalist power in ideas and rational choice institutionalist power over ideas. *** Political science has moved on from those early debates about political scientific explanation, focused on systemic and behavioural approaches, as well as from the debates in the philosophies of science and social science. But a residual set of assumptions remains: that political science can be a ‘science’ by following rules of verification and falsification through reduction and quantification. If nothing else, this essay should have made it clear that we should stop trying to emulate the ideas of philosophers of science, with their idealization of physics, and stop looking for answers in fields so much narrower in their objects—rather than subjects—of study, but instead get on with the task of explaining political reality with as many methods as are appropriate. We may lose the claim to science but we gain our freedom to be social scientists. And as social scientists, we are freer to explore all the ways of interpreting social and political reality in all its many variations by situating knowledge in its social and political contexts. Discursive institutionalism serves to update the Rudolphs’ interpretivism as it reiterates the importance of studies using a multiplicity of perspectives on empirical reality. In this chapter, for practical purposes, I have referred mainly to the Rudolphs’ essays in the first volume of their three volume opus of collected essays: The Realm of Ideas: Inquiry and Theory (2008), from Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956–2006. But their books and other works make the same points, often with more detailed analysis and at greater length with substantive theories serving to interpret political and social realities. In rereading these essays, I remembered how central the Rudolphs were to my own initial intellectual development, having learned interpretivism at the ‘knees of the masters’, in classes such as ‘The Modernity of Tradition’

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and ‘Domination and Subjection’. But it is equally important for me to highlight the double function of ‘situated knowledge’: not just as an empirical method but as meta-theoretical justification for updating interpretivism through discursive institutionalism. Today, political scientists have come to speak another language with different ways of explaining the similar kinds of phenomena considered in earlier eras. Contemporary political science’s new institutionalism requires an interpretive response that can speak to practitioners in ways that they can understand, with arguments, critiques, and admonitions that can persuade them of the ‘power’ of interpretive ideas. This is why discursive institutionalism is needed today, but in no way supersedes interpretive approaches. On the contrary, it is interpretivism. But it is interpretivism with a difference, since it involves more extensive analysis of the epistemological grounding of ideas and discursive interaction in the philosophies of science and social science, more systematic discussion of the vast field of ideational and discursive analysis, more critical engagement with other contemporary approaches to explanation (including but not limited to neo-institutionalist approaches), and a greater attention to how ideas and discourse are central to the exercise of power. There’s more to be done however. My own empirical work has focused on the importance of ideational innovation and discursive leadership in the dynamics of change. But more could be done with regard to how ideas and discourse may resonate beyond the limits of their cognitive and normative qualities and their contextualization in coordinative or communicative discourse. Linguistic and psychological issues related to the uses of language, or the appeal of particular kinds of narratives to individuals’ emotions and their moral imagination, could benefit from further development. But this is where we can look for greater insights on the psychological aspects and moral dimensions of interpretivism, as developed by Kristen Monroe in the next chapter.

Endnote 1. This was the main conclusion of my dissertation (PhD in political science, University of Chicago, 1981) ‘Meaning and Method in the Natural and Social Sciences and Its Implications for Political Science’ with Susanne Rudolph as chair, Stephen Toulmin from the Committee on Social Thought as the main reader, and David Greenstone as third reader.

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A Different Way of Seeing Things The Intellectual Legacy of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph

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he Rudolphs’ impact on the study of Indian politics is well known. Their influence extended far beyond this one area, however, touching on topics as disparate as leadership and xenophobia, identity and group violence, and narrative interpretive analysis and methodology, thus making their work relevant for issues that remain central today in political science, political psychology, and ethics via their treatment of concepts such as moral imagination, identity, agency, self-perceptions, and self-esteem. Truly, the fertile richness and breadth of the Rudolphs’ intellectual legacy is staggering. In this chapter, I focus on both substantive theoretical issues as well as methodological concerns; in doing so, I highlight the extent to which social science investigates not just institutions or behaviour but the critical role political scientists can play in investigating how perceptions of reality create human connections that serve as crucibles for social and political interaction. Essentially, then, my chapter considers the implications of the Rudolphs’ interpretive methodology for understanding the actions of people with regard to vital social issues of our time. It underscores the limits of deductively imposing individual social understandings such as self-interest, and elaborates how emotions, expectations, and perceptions interact to construct identities that shape and constrain political choice. It builds on the Rudolphs’ belief that proper social science is not just about institutions or behavioural Kristen Renwick Monroe, A Different Way of Seeing Things: The Intellectual Legacy of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/9780190125011.003.0004

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analysis. Social science also investigates how perceptions of reality create human connections that humanize, or dehumanize, relations with others with dramatic political consequences. This concern with the humanization and dehumanization of relationships further opens the door for political scientists to ask about what I call moral salience and moral imagination, and about emotions in politics more generally. Part one of this chapter begins by focusing on the Rudolphs’ pioneering work in what we now think of as political psychology, especially their work on identity, leadership, perceptions, expectations, and moral imagination. Part two documents the Rudolphs’ influence in my work on altruism, self-interest, and rational choice theory. This section also outlines the Rudolphs’ influence on the work on moral choice, especially the research asking how we survive political trauma with our humanity intact. This part of the chapter focuses on the concept of ethical perspective and the importance of political psychology for explicating both ethical and political behaviour, especially acts of prejudice, violence, and compassion during wars. The chapter concludes by discussing narrative as a methodology, noting a narrative’s ability to lend insight into cognitive processes that are critical for human action. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, the Rudolphs urged scholars to be aware of the ideological foundations of rigid ‘scientific’ models and to move towards a humanistic social science, one in which we leave ourselves open to the ability to be surprised in our research about our fellow human beings.

The Intellectual Depth and Breadth of the Rudolphs’ Work Political Psychology Although not thought of as political psychologists, the Rudolphs employed themes throughout their careers that now enliven political psychology. Susanne worked with Erik Erikson, and his influence is evident in much of the Rudolphs’ work. Consider The Modernity of Tradition (1967) which presented a variety of understandings of both modernity and tradition to reveal how India’s traditional structures and norms had been adapted or transformed to serve the needs of a modernizing society. The book reveals how the persistence of traditional

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features within modernity nonetheless answers the basic needs of the human condition. Straddling the bridge between the powerful behavioural revolution, located at the University of Chicago in the works of people such as David Easton, and comparative politics, in the work of Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (also later a colleague), the Rudolphs analysed three areas of Indian life: social stratification, charismatic leadership, and law.1 Blending this kind of Eastonian framework with a Weberian approach to history and comparative politics, the Rudolphs questioned whether objective historical conditions—urbanization, literacy, advanced industrialization—are actually requisites for political modernization. Interestingly, I noticed glimmers of political psychology buried throughout the book, for example, in the book’s discussion of caste and how this most traditional of structures, long regarded as antithetical to political modernization, actually provided the powerful function of mobilization and interest articulation. I found political psychology again in the Rudolphs’ discussion of political integration and untouchability, and their emphasis on fellow feeling resonated with me as I thought of my own work on the rescuers of Jews. Their discussion of the traditional roots of charisma, of Gandhi and Amar Singh, among other discussions, were ripe with the concept of identity, of personality, of moral imagination—all themes that are key in political psychology today.2 Their courses included a discussion of border crossers, people who try to work across boundaries of caste or nationality that can divide us. I later used this concept in analysing people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, seeing them as border crossers between the world of everyday morality and the horrors of the Third Reich. Although not central to political psychology, their discussion of how we find new meaning in old paths and of self-control also suggests the value of using psychological tools to understand politics. Their classes, especially everybody’s favourite course ‘The Psychosocial Analysis of Subjection, Domination and Equality: A Study of the Asymmetrical Relationship’, raised critical questions for me, both as their student and later. How does our perception of others influence our actions towards them? If I see someone as a friend, will I treat them better than if I view them as a stranger? Why do I view X as someone like me or someone in my group, as opposed to categorizing X as someone ‘different’ who can threaten me, my in-group, or the world? How much of prejudice, discrimination, ethnic violence, genocide, and even

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wars are premised on this simple understanding of how we view each other in relation to ourselves? The Rudolphs’ discussion of the dreadful violence surrounding Partition was my introduction to trying to understand such horrors. This was when I began thinking about prejudice and the violence it can breed in terms of identity politics. The Rudolphs showed me that it is too simple to write off this violence as the result of ignorant, uncivilized, and uneducated people filled with fear. Grasping this fact turned me to social psychology and social identity theory in particular, to try to grapple with phenomena too often written off as the madness of crowds. The Rudolphs taught me to be wary of crude psychological explanations of wars and ethnic violence as simply irrational events, situations where things spiraled out of control, and which could have been contained if only reason had prevailed. The Rudolphs showed me there are other explanations, and we can search for these using the tools of psychology. By alerting me to the impact of emotions and connections and, in turn, their importance for leadership, I was able to resist the dichotomy—long prevalent in psychology—between reason and emotion. I understood that emotions enter our reasoning process at so many parts of the decision-making process that it does not make sense to hold emotion separate. It was the Rudolphs and their emphasis on the role of charisma in political leadership, and how modern democratic politics increases the scope for charisma, that helped me understand how political leaders play on the subconscious prejudices of people to gain political power for themselves.

Political Leadership The extent to which aspiring political leaders manipulate our fears of differences, flaming them into hatred of ‘the other’ for their own political gain, is just one illustration, and would lead me—and other scholars (such as David Winter or Rose McDermott)—to the critical role of political leadership. I remember the Rudolphs relating how Gandhi travelled to places with communal violence, and the violence dissipated, even ceased. A later article in The New Republic (1993) explained the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s through reference to an ethnic leader’s attempts to exploit nascent fears in the mass populace in order to gain political advantage, much as the Rudolphs

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suggested happened in India and Pakistan during Partition. My own later work—and that of others (Fujii 2009) who study ethnic, communal, and religious violence—finds the existance of this same phenomenon. Further, the idea now seems commonplace that politicians are more interested in their own success than in the long-term good of their countries, and thus exploit and even manipulate behaviour by bundling such fears, even when doing so leads to violence or war. This theme plays a central role in explaining the rise of Hitler and Milosevic, and echoed in the political campaign of Donald Trump, who so successfully drew on and manipulated anxieties at feeling left out, abusing the suspicions around those who are different and threatening, to win the 2016 primaries and election (Vance 2016).3 The Rudolphs’ rich use of political psychology also surfaced in their discussion of Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’. Here, the emphasis is on perceptions and expectations. No one really wants the elephant shot, but everyone gets caught up in what they think is expected of them. Social roles, expectations of others, and our own beliefs about what others expect us to do—all limit the range of options people find available, not just morally but also cognitively.

Expectations, Political Development, and Political Violence The role of expectations was brilliantly discussed in the Rudolphs’ courses via one of my favourite books, Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856/1955).4 Some 100 years before sociologists discovered the concepts of rising expectations and the importance of relative deprivation, and even longer before Thomas Sargent won his Nobel for articulating the impact of rising expectations on the economy, these concepts surfaced in de Tocqueville’s magisterial yet succinct analysis of the extent to which a revolutionary event flowed logically from what had preceded it. It was a masterful illustration of how to study political development, another of the Rudolphs’ interests. Both in terms of leadership and the importance of perceptions and moral imagination, the Rudolphs again were ahead of the rest of the intellectual community. How we as individuals conceptualize our way out of problems, and how we as a polity conceptualize solutions to our common problems—be it the problem of Partition in India of the 1940s or immigration in America today—owes much to our moral

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imagination. Political leadership is crucially related to this moral imagination. The most successful political leaders are those with the most fertile imagination. The best leaders have the best moral imagination, as witness the Rudolphs’ discussion of Gandhi.

Moral Imagination Unlike the importance of political leadership and perceptions and expectations, the concept of moral imagination has not been so widely recognized or utilized in political science.5 If imagination is the human ability to grasp that which is not, to learn and understand—to think ourselves into other people’s lives—without having actually experienced it ourselves, then moral imagination is the ability to view moral issues in a different light, to imagine new possibilities, to consider not just the traditional options for acting in any given situation but also the capability, talent, and the sheer gift of envisioning alternative possibilities, visualizing new and non-traditional potentialities that might help.6 Gandhi was an excellent illustration of the power of moral imagination. I remember the Rudolphs telling the story, so familiar to any Rudolph student, of a Hindu who supposedly approached Gandhi during a dreadful personal incident of communal violence.7 Nahari: I’m going to Hell! I killed a child! I smashed his head against a wall. Gandhi: Why? Nahari: Because they killed my son! The Muslims killed my son! Gandhi: I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father were killed and raise him as your own. Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.

The extraordinary ability to even conceive of such a thing in the midst of such carnage still gives pause. Minus the moral imagination, we would be captives of our own experience. We could take action only against the wrongs with which we ourselves have had personal involvement. This is not to say that we can ever fully put ourselves in the place of others. Empathy has limits. Nor can we fully grasp the agonies of people who have endured famine, war, insidious poverty, slavery, or genocide. But it is unfeeling and neglectful of our responsibility as human beings to simply accept that the suffering of people we do not know lies beyond our comprehension, is closed off to us, or that a sense of fellow-feeling

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is impossible, and that the resultant acts of human kindness and rescue are not required by our common humanity. This is where moral imagination enters. Why do some people remain so rooted in this reality that they can only see the world as it is, whereas others have the ability, indeed sometimes possess the need, to perceive things differently? Isn’t it the case that stories play the important role of encouraging us to think more creatively than we had before? Don’t they design characters who feel real enough to us to help us take that imaginary leap between our reality and other newer realities into worlds in which these characters reside? The Rudolphs’ use of literature to convey this in their courses was another innovation that shaped my later intellectual life, as I began to listen to the stories people told about their lives. Sometimes these stories revealed rich moral imaginations; other times, the stories revealed the crippling lack of moral choice that a particular narrative could impose. But these stories people tell, to make sense of their lives, are critical to both moral choice and political action. Consider just one important part of moral imagination in this regard: the ability to conceptualize your way out of a problem, to see what you want to do and then figure out a way to get from A to E. This involves not just recognizing that you are at point A and would like to be at point E, but to employ your imagination to grasp how you can actually construct a point B and a point C and how these intermediate points then can lead to points D and E, if you will. This process probably has something to do with self-esteem, with the feeling that you deserve the happiness, that you are worthy of being at point D or point E, that you have earned the right to live in the better world most of us can only imagine. But it also has something to do with the ability to shake off your traditional paradigm, the conventional way of seeing the world, the world view that everyone else shares and which you inherited from your family, culture, or society. This, in turn, probably relates to thinking for yourself and to the ability to take a dispassionate assessment of your own values, to determine where they are holding you back, where they are lacking, or where they no longer serve you well at all. It doesn’t always happen. Life sometimes does, in fact, equate to a zero-sum game. Not all situations are tractable. But I am always amazed at how many times in life we are able to conceptualize our way out of problems. Identifying the role of stories in doing this—especially the

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stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the world around us—is another important contribution of the Rudolphs. Taken in conjunction with their emphasis on identity, perceptions, and emotions, moral imagination helps us understand identity and the importance of recognizing and appreciating the key role identities often play in political life. It is possible to re-conceptualize things in order to survive, to create structures that work for an individual or a people by forming a different narrative. We can find narratives that bring us together, as Gandhi tried to do. Robert Kennedy was fond of concluding his campaign speeches by referring to moral imagination, linking it to political leadership: ‘Most men see things as they are and ask why. I see things as they might be and ask why not.’8 Both Kennedy and Gandhi offered moral imagination as a healing narrative, as opposed to a narratives that tear us apart, as Trump is now doing in the United States of America and as Milosevic did in Serbia. Consider Gandhi’s vision of a universal humanity in which individuals could exist with whatever identity they chose to emphasize. Juxtapose that with the Partition narrative of extremists on both sides, in which individuals were trapped by their communal groups, religions, or castes. Which view of moral imagination would you choose?

Impact of the Rudolphs: A Scholar’s Experience Let me now note the Rudolphs’ intellectual impact on my own work, especially as I shifted from behavioural surveys and econometric models—as I was taught at the University of Chicago’s political science and economics departments—to a narrative interpretive analysis of altruism, moral choice, and genocide.

Research on Self-Interest, Altruism, and Moral Choice I was not initially trained as a political psychologist, beginning my scholarly life as a political economist, doing econometric models of political support. After I finished my first book Presidential Popularity and the Economy (Monroe 1984), I stepped back and looked at the general field. I became concerned that many of the so-called great debates in the field (such as pocketbook versus socio-tropic voting) were actually

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simply reflections of different parts of the elephant, so to speak. I thus embarked on more basic theoretical work, undertaking an empirical examination of the philosophical foundation of political economy and rational choice theory, the assumption that people pursue self-interest, subject to information and opportunity costs. Altruism—behaviour designed to further the welfare of another, even when that risks serious costs to the actor—does not fit easily into this paradigm. Yet, we know altruism continues to exist. Why? I constructed an empirical examination of altruism, treating it as an analytical tool that could yield insight into the limitations of theories, such as rational choice, based on the assumption of self-interest. This work led to my interest in political psychology, and returned me to the Rudolphs, in the days before there were formal courses in political psychology or even a clearly defined and officially designated field. The International Society of Political Psychology was founded only in 1978.9 The Rudolphs had piqued my interest in the interplay between psychology, politics, and economics, and my work on rational actor theory owes much to their influence. Essentially, I concluded that rational actor theory was a response to behaviouralism ignoring the importance of the mind.10 Still rooted in the behaviouralism of Chicago, and most of the rest of the discipline, I designed a 14-page survey of questions to provide insight into the main explanations of altruism offered in fields as diverse as evolutionary biology to economics and, via rational choice theory, to much of political science, sociology, and psychology. Do altruists engage in what economists call reciprocal altruism, in which I do something nice for you but driven not by a concern for your welfare so much as in the hope that you will reciprocate and do something nice for me later? Or perhaps it is psychic altruism, as economists such as Gary Becker—a Nobel laureate and colleague of the Rudolphs—argued. This explanation posits that I am nice to you only so I can buy myself the psychic pleasure of feeling good about myself. Thomas Hobbes supposedly gave money to a beggar. His companion asked him why, voicing his surprise that Hobbes would do such a thing, given Hobbes’s well-known views on self-interest as the driving force behind human behaviour. Hobbes supposedly replied: ‘I did not do it for the poor man. I did it to alleviate my own discomfort at seeing his pitiable state’ (Monroe 1996). Or was altruism merely a reflection of kin or group

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selection, as evolutionary biologists suggest, in which I forego having children to keep my genes alive through my sister’s children? I devised the 14-page survey to test these ideas in the field. I then constructed a continuum running from pure self-interest to altruism. At one end, I located entrepreneurs as people who take an idea and try to gain profit from it. Next came philanthropists who engage in some acts of altruism but keep much of their money for themselves and whose altruism does little to harm them. I next chose winners of the Carnegie Hero Award, individuals not paid to do heroic altruistic deeds, so no policemen or firemen, but merely people who risked their lives to save others, such as those who run into burning buildings to save people.11 The continuum ended with the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, a group fascinating because their commitment was not simply a one-time act (as with the Carnegie heroes) or one that costed something but was not life threatening (as philanthropy is). For the rescuers of Jews the sacrifice was extensive, full-time, and enduring over a long time in many instances. It could also have costed the lives of their families, as it often did when rescuers were discovered and their entire families killed, not quickly but painfully and slowly by being hanged just above the ground with piano wire so they would slowly suffocate in their own blood. To my surprise none of the theories I had thought would explain altruism worked and I was left to follow the clues—as the Rudolphs had taught—wherever they led, which for me was far afield to linguistics, categorization theory, and moral sense theory. I found altruism triggered by diverse factors such as religion, socialization, duty, and even innate predispositions, but that the critical factor is psychological, located in the way altruists think about themselves in relation to others. Where the rest of us see strangers, altruists see fellow human beings. Cognitive categorization creates a schematic framework that I called the altruistic perspective, making the heart of altruism the perception that we are all connected through our common humanity. The importance of perceptions and emotions was clearly evident in my work on altruism. My work on the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust found that this amazingly important life-and-death decision was not the result of rational calculus. Over and over, the rescuers became almost exasperated, or at least bemused, with me when I asked them what was the thought process that led them to this choice.

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Madame Trocme said, ‘People like you ask me, “How did you make a decision?” [She laughed] There was no decision to make. Are you believing that the Jews are your brothers? Then do it.’ Another Czech rescuer, who saved over 100 Jews before he ended up in a concentration camp, told me, ‘The hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason’ (Otto Springer). Politics is not all rational calculus or even conscious calculus at all. Emotions enter at every stage and it makes no sense to separate the two.12 If The Heart of Altruism (1996) revealed the importance of an altruistic perspective, what did this perspective consist of exactly? A chance to explore more fully what constituted and caused this altruistic perspective came with The Hand of Compassion (2004), in which I explicated the altruistic perspective by a more detailed consideration of the narratives of the rescuers of Jews. This narrative interpretive analysis suggested how the way we view the world, and ourselves in it, creates a feeling of moral salience, turning generalized sentiments of concern into a strongly felt imperative to help. The sense of identity among the rescuers—those closest to what I thought of as pure altruism—was so strong that it effectively created a cognitive menu in which certain behaviours simply were not available, much as a menu in a restaurant or a computer that sets and delineates the choices of what one can eat or what programme one can utilize. Because of their cognitive menus, altruists can no more turn away another human being in need than the rest of us can turn away our own children. Behaviour is strongly influenced, even limited or determined, by our sense of self in relation to others. It is our perception of ourselves in relation to others that is key, and it can shift over time, depending on how the narrative is constructed. Was this the case for all people, I wondered. Or was it so just for altruists? Do all human beings effectively have a moral continuum shaped by their identities? Would bystanders and even perpetrators of genocide, or their supporters, have similar cognitive menus? Was morality like language, in the sense that we all have the innate ability but simply fill in the type of language differently according to our culture, upbringing, et cetera? Were bystanders and perpetrators simply at different points on a moral continuum in terms of their identities and self-perceptions? Following the clues, as the Rudolphs had taught me, to answer these questions led me to moral sense theory (Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Anthony Ashley Cooper [the Third Earl

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Shaftesbury]), linguistic and categorization theory (Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff), and even evolutionary biology (Frans DeWaal) and neuroscience (Antonio Damasio). Thus armed, I expanded my empirical analysis in Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide (2012). This final book in what had grown into a trilogy on moral choice and identity tried to both explain the psychology surrounding the Holocaust and use the interview data from World War II as an analytical lens to bring into focus the underlying theme in the work on moral choice—how we treat others. I believed that understanding the political psychology surrounding moral choice during the Holocaust could help instruct us on similar psychological phenomena during other genocides, other instances of ethnic cleansing, civil wars, and religious, ethnic, and sectarian violence, akin to the Partition of India to which the Rudolphs had exposed me. This book, indeed the entire 24-year project, taught me about moral psychology and how psychology influences our daily lives as we construct moral choices in a wide variety of situations. Building on my rescuer interviews, I expanded my analysis to find Nazis and bystanders who were comparable in general socio-demographic characteristics to the rescuers. I was able to construct such a sample, including one bystander who was related to a rescuer. My matched sets were a Dutch sample, to minimize issues concerning national identity and German culture. I found that bystanders see themselves as people who are weak, low on agency, and therefore with little ability to help anyone or to effect events. When I asked the bystanders if they had helped save any Jews during the Second Word War, they would respond: ‘But what could I do? I was one person, alone against the Nazis.’ In sharp contrast, especially striking because of the identical phrases employed, the rescuers would explain why they had been compelled to help Jews, downed airmen, or even, amazingly, Germans after the war: ‘But what else could I do? They were human beings, like you and me.’ The same lack of choice and the same insistence on spontaneous, unreasoning responses, along with a strongly developed perception of themselves in relation to others, was my first and continuing surprise. The few Nazis and Nazi sympathizers I interviewed expressed the same lack of choice but distinctly different self-perceptions. Nazis described themselves as people under attack by the Jews, gypsies (Roma), social democrats, homosexuals, decadent artists, and so on. They viewed their acts of

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killing as we would view our actions in exterminating cockroaches who invade our homes. A baby Jew was more akin to a cockroach than to another human being. Interestingly, the reference to cockroaches was to surface in the Rwanda-Burundi genocide, when Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines broadcast that ‘the cockroaches are coming and you must arm and defend yourself’ (Fujii 2009).13 Beyond these perceptions of the self and the other, however, was another psychological factor—agency. While the bystanders saw themselves as weak and the rescuers saw themselves as part of all humanity, the Nazis and their sympathizers saw themselves as people driven by the winds of history. The ‘thing’ that caused other events and which drove the Nazi acts owed much to a kind of Hegelian/Marxian dialectic. One had to be caught up in the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, carried on and attune to the winds of change. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers thus also saw themselves as people who had no choice. History demanded that they act in a certain way. Again, they were defined by a lack of choice and quite unique world views and self-perceptions.

The Ethical Perspective The people I interviewed for this trilogy about their World War II activities all revealed the same counter-intuitive truth: How we see ourselves in relation to others limits the options we find available, as when the bystanders saw themselves as people low on agency, weak and unable to take decisive action, and thus became the kind of individuals who were, in fact, unable to help someone else. In contrast, the rescuers of Jews saw themselves as people connected to all human beings through their common humanity. Turning away a Jew in need was as difficult for them as it would be for most of us to turn away our friends or family members. The critical link to political action, even in the form of helping or turning away another person facing a life-or-death situation, is the psychological perception of oneself, of who one is, and of how one sees oneself in relation to others. I took these three works and tried to design a theory of moral choice that would allow for the empirical observation of behaviour in which perceptions—of one’s self and one’s self in relation to others—were key. What I called the ethical perspective was a framework designed to further explain moral action using an identity-based theory of moral

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choice. Although I developed this framework based on interview data from the Holocaust, I believe there is a convincing case to be made that the framework itself has an applicability that extends far beyond that time period. It can be utilized usefully to explain a far wider range of ethical situations, from everyday life to the kind of moral courage required during war and genocide. On the basis of the empirical analysis presented in these three books, I argue that a crucial part of ethical action emanates from what I call moral salience, defined as the feeling that the suffering of others is relevant for us. I further argue that moral salience constitutes an important part of the ethical perspective, and that even if one does not feel a sense of moral salience, we all have an ethical perspective. As the empirical analysis in this trilogy shows, what makes a person’s ethical perspective a moral one, as opposed to an immoral or an ethically neutral one, is the particular cognitive classification that we construct of the other person in relation to ourselves. These categorizations are a function of how critical values become integrated into one’s self-concept and world view. It is these categorizations that create the feeling that another’s suffering is relevant for us and makes it imperative that we act, not just feel bad or sympathetic.

Political Psychology and Ethics: Surviving Political Trauma with One’s Humanity Intact All of my work in this area owed much to my time with the Rudolphs. I tried to use scientific techniques to understand ethical issues, and my interest in understanding the response to political trauma and war also builds directly on themes I first studied in the Rudolphs’ classes. A Darkling Plain: Stories of Conflict and Humanity during War (2015) uses narrative interpretive interviews with people who lived through wars to ask what factors help people retain or reclaim their humanity.14 Despite its obvious importance, this question receives scant scholarly attention, perhaps because of the overwhelming aspect of war. It is often great works of literature that capture the human dimension of war.15 The generally accepted wisdom is that war brings out the worst in people, pitting us against one another. ‘War is hell,’ General William Tecumseh Sherman famously noted, and even the wars most clearly designated as ‘just’ nonetheless inflict massive cruelty and destruction. Since ethics is concerned with discovering what takes us to a morally

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superior place, however, one conducive to human flourishing and happiness, studying what helps people survive wartime trauma becomes an extremely valuable enterprise. Certainly insofar as lingering trauma contributes to future wars, this topic should be a more central part of international relations. A Darkling Plain, thus, was intended to address this scholarly void. What did this one social science analysis reveal about the human aspect of war, particularly how people pick up the pieces, try to make connections, and weave a pattern that lends meaning to the appalling, unexpected events that shocked their worlds and threatened their spirits? Can the stories of people whose existing lives were shattered by war teach us about our own human capacity to process trauma, heal wounds, reclaim lost spirits, and derive meaning and purpose from the most horrific of personal events?16 This book grew out of a class project and as we began our study, we found insights from biographies, memoirs, and scholarly literature on coping with emotional traumas and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Distilling these insights produced propositions that we then analysed using a dataset of over 50 in-depth narrative interviews with survivors from a broad range of wars, genocides, and other brutalizing political conflicts. Nineteen of these narratives—from the early twentieth-century Armenian genocide through World War II and Vietnam, ending with US soldiers currently in Iraq and civilians in Afghanistan—formed the focus of our analysis. These narratives were not limited to soldiers, and included civilians and victims of oppression in a wide variety of wars. We utilized no independent measures to indicate which individuals did retain their humanity, but instead relied on the speakers’ own self-reporting, allowing each individual to weigh for themselves their raw drive to survive, their assessment of both environmental and personality factors in this survival, and how they created meaning out of suffering and coped with dislocations and loss. Within these constraints, we pinpointed a few critical factors that future analysts can build upon as, we hope, later scholars use our work to develop more refined, systematic tools of analysis. Overall, our findings confirm the importance of psychological mechanisms, reaffirm parts of major theoretical approaches to understanding human behaviour, and fill in important details concerning how people actually operate, often in ways that are counter-intuitive.

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First, Freud was right. A raw drive to live impels most of us. Indeed, many of the coping mechanisms we found critical for human survival may be reflections of this basic desire to survive. The reductionism of this formulation, however, impelled us to explore additional explanations. Doing so revealed little correlation between either physical or emotional survival and the emphasis on the human need for power and control. In contrast, the environment’s influence on surviving was frequently mentioned.17 Luck plays a critical role during war, not just in survival but also in determining how much of one’s humanity survives intact. When we considered specific psychological mechanisms that help preserve humanity we found several factors related to the enduring existence of a humane self. These included (1) a sense of self-worth, (2) a sense of belonging to something broader than one’s self, (3) forging a link between wartime experiences and one’s prior life, and (4) an odd mixture of fatalism, hope, and the ability to stretch one’s mental map to encompass shifts in the political and personal world. Further, in noting the importance of a sense of self and self-esteem while undergoing the trauma of war, the ability to find a linkage between their pre- and post-war selves seemed especially important. Such continuity of the self signified emotional resilience.18 Beyond this we made another interesting observation. People’s psychological coping mechanisms are remarkably intertwined. For example, hope was closely related to fatalism, and acceptance closely related to happiness. Speakers who lost hope for a better future became fatalistic, but this fatalism was not necessarily negative. Fatalism could alleviate guilt at surviving when others did not. Fatalism and acceptance helped people recognize they had little control over their lives. This acceptance ironically freed them to lead happy lives later. This may be because such fatalism provided an escape from the stress associated with feeling responsible for events over which one truly had no control.19 We linked this finding to the fact that there was little or no discussion of being alarmed at losing control over one’s life, and wonder if people with an inordinate need for control may fare less well in war than do those who can adjust and adapt to not having such control.20 Finally, fatalism was related to hope. Paradoxically, lack of hope could prove to be a positive factor, insofar as it forced speakers to stretch cognitively and devise new possibilities to survive and flourish. The capacity to adjust cognitively to the shifting political and personal

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realities of war and the post-war world critically impacted survivors’ capabilities to build a happy life and to assimilate their wartime memories in a way that allowed them to flourish emotionally, if not to find meaning out of the suffering they had endured.

Narrative The methodological technique I have employed in all of the research described above is one introduced to me by the Rudolphs: narrative interpretation. A narrative is essentially a story, and stories are as old as time, with both religion and mythology using various types of narratives to help us understand the world around us. They both create and reflect our reality.21 Stories, thus, help us make sense of our world and can reveal much to the objective observer about how we ourselves think. This makes narratives valuable tools in teaching, and I have followed the Rudolphs’ lead in using literature in courses, not just to touch on both the emotional and the analytical aspects of politics but also to draw students into research in ways that traditional political science analysis cannot.22 Using narratives to structure my research and teaching has helped me understand the big problems that trouble me, and it has helped my students do the same. My work on altruism came out of my belief that rational choice theory is such a powerful intellectual tool that it blinds us to the very important parts of life that it cannot explain. However, beyond this professional interest in altruism, at a more personal level I simply do not understand what we should give to others and what we should keep to ourselves. How much do we value the wishes and needs of those around us and how much can—or should—we care for our own interests first? When the stewards on a plane tell us that in case of a problem we should put on our own oxygen masks first and then help others, I always wonder: What mother would do that? Would I? Probably not. The reaction would be instinctive, not rational, and it touches on what I find a fundamental problem in normative political science: our relations to others. How much of this category of behaviour is rational? How much spontaneous? How much thought out ahead of time, or visceral?23 As a teaching tool, incorporating interviews with people who survived wars proved an invaluable pedagogical instrument, one that can alert young people to the importance of political psychology and help

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them recognize their own ability to conduct moving oral histories. A Darkling Plain grew out of one such class project. I thought it would be interesting for the students to learn how it ‘felt’ to live through a war by having them interview survivors of a war, genocide, or ethnic cleansing. The interviews were so amazing that I asked if anyone wanted to help me pull them together into a book. Three students did, and two are listed as co-authors. Ironically, it was a student who interviewed a Khmer Rouge survivor who best articulated the value of stories. ‘I tell my story because I’m passing on my knowledge. I’ve been there. I’ve felt it. It’s your choice to decide how to use it’ (Kimberly, Khmer Rouge survivor, A Darkling Plain). Ideally, wartime stories teach students that everyone has a story to tell; learning how to listen can heighten respect for the ‘ordinary’ people they meet each day. Life stories put us in touch with deep eternal themes that students need to think about. They increase students’ sensitivity to the suffering and wisdom of others. In thinking about how best to teach about war, I am reminded of Brideshead Revisited (2012 [1944]) by Evelyn Waugh, a novel that begins during World War II and returns the hero to memories of a happier time during his college years. The protagonist is Charles Ryder, who goes up to Oxford in the 1920s and meets the Flytes—a charismatic, if ill-fated, aristocratic family—through their son, Sebastian. Charles has had a loveless life; his mother killed during World War I and his reserved father giving new meaning to the term repressed Englishman. Charles is drawn to Sebastian’s joie de vivre and neglects his studies as a result. Charles’s older cousin berates him, trying to steer him back onto the straight and narrow path and away from the sybaritic world of what the cousin judges Sebastian’s hedonistic, self-indulgent bad set. Charles replies: ‘I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon’; that was enough then. Is more needed now? Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper’s game-cock maturity with a sturdier fowl. I could tell him that all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table. I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.24

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Re-reading these stories, thinking about my students and how I so casually suggested they interview someone they knew personally, I wonder how much of what they learned originated in the emotional impact of stories told by speakers with whom they shared a particular bond, a human connection: a friend, parent, grandparent, or relative. How much of social science needs to be infused with affection for us to understand others? What are the limits of dry, objective, analytical rigor for comprehending another’s reality? Need we—can we—combine both the rigor of analysis with our empathy and love for other human beings, especially when attempting to understand topics evoking deep pathos, such as Holocaust survivors, soldiers returning from war, or civilians whose lives were upended by war? I have no answers but, as the Rudolphs taught us, unanswerable questions can lead us to deeper, more philosophically challenging and profound issues. Can systematic work in social science yield the insight we need, as scholars and as human beings, to deal with the emotional consequences of war? Asking students to conduct the kind of interviews my class did for this project seems far more useful a way for them to gain a sense of what war really is like than merely reading traditional social science texts, and I recommend this hands-on teaching technique, which provides an immediacy and a personal impact that is inestimable. For years, scholars separated reason and emotion, thinking the former far superior in helping people reach moral choices. Cognitive scientists now tell us what the Rudolphs knew long ago: emotion enters and influences the reasoning process at so many points that trying to separate the two may well be futile. Maybe that is as it should be. Perhaps emotional jolts shock us out of traditional ways of thinking. Since the Rudolphs introduced me to narrative analysis the technique has become more widely accepted in political science. One aspect of narrative interpretation, however, continually unsettles social scientists: interpreting silences. I argued in an earlier work that people do not comment on the ordinary, on the commonplace.25 Silences capture what is unremarkable. The trick for analysts lies in interpreting silences correctly. In reviewing the stories in A Darkling Plain, I found little of the swashbuckling jingoism that so frequently accompanies justifications and beginnings of wars. There were no scenes out of Gone with the Wind, of wild enthusiasm, of a rush to combat before the war is over

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and the chance for battlefield glory eludes young patriots. There were no rousing calls to exaltation from inspirational leaders speaking of the need to avenge ‘a day of infamy’. Instead, we find people ‘stuck in the mud in the middle of a civil war’ (Fabiola, El Salvadoran civil war); we hear of wars that easily constitute ‘the worst experiences of a lifetime’ (Sebastian, American soldier in the Iraq war); of people who ‘saw too much’ (Marie, Lebanese civil war), who carry ‘bad memories and bad feelings’ (Sara, Khmer Rouge), and live the rest of their lives as ‘damaged goods’ (Gunther, son of an SS father), not happy heroes. At best, collateral damage is justified—and then rarely—by a greater good. Perhaps these insights give social science a unique edge over poetry or fiction. Fiction gives the author voice. Social science attempts to give voice to others. We endeavour to do so free of our own preconceptions, devoid of literary agendas, striving for objectivity, a detached and fair neutrality we recognize we may never achieve. Stepping back and listening to these stories, gathered so randomly, I was struck by their contrast with the many political science books on war written by policymakers, the old men who start wars. Such books frequently entail a justification for the wars the protagonists began, or at least ratified or colluded in. With the exception of one speaker—Doc, an American in Iraq, himself now involved in homeland security—I found none of this in any of the wartime narratives I have been collecting for nearly 10 years now. Nearly every other person in A Darkling Plain emphasizes only the negatives of wars. The forest they show us is dark, primordial, and dangerous, in which no soldiers cheer, no crowds exalt. Our speakers, ordinary people all, reach out to us, exuding revulsion at and the desire to suppress the memory of their war, searching to make sense of their experience, yearning to close the chapter and move on, back to the blessed mundane of the everyday, away from an experience so searing that—to paraphrase a soldier describing the Battle of the Bulge—‘the enormity of it [war] tends to reduce the rest of life to a footnote’, but perhaps a footnote in which, they hope, we can all now permanently reside. *** The Rudolphs’ contribution to political psychology, especially their importance for understanding identity, leadership, perceptions,

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expectations, and moral imagination, is widely felt throughout the studies of political science. Certainly, it inspired and shaped my work on altruism and moral choice, as did their work on narrative interpretation, the process of using stories to understand how people organize the myriad facts around them to make sense of the world, and how the resultant cognitive perceptions of the world, in turn, then influence political action. I want to conclude, however, by drawing attention to an overlooked aspect of the Rudolphs’ contribution to making the study of politics truly scientific. Perestroika was widely hailed—and severely criticized—as a movement designed, in part, to change the scientific study of politics by expanding the types of methodologies found acceptable. Debates concerning the proper scientific method are cyclical in political science. The current iteration—Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT)—stresses the need to make data accessible and research designs transparent, so experimental and empirical work can be replicated and retested. I have expressed my reservations about DA-RT elsewhere (2018).26 It is the fundamental interpretation underlying DA-RT’s more rigid conceptualization of science, however, that troubles me the most, for I find it at odds with what is a basic, if not essential, premise of careful scientific work: the notion that ‘it could be otherwise’ (Nowotny 2015). The creative uncertainty of good science thrives on more than routine, more than the replication of elegant models systematically applied in a pre-designed manner. Science must observe and allow for the capture of the unexpected. Generating large amounts of data—transparently or not—still requires interpretation by human beings who are sensitive and open to allowing for the unanticipated, the unforeseen. I do not want political science to adopt a rigid and—I would argue—narrow conceptualization of scientific method in the search for reproducibility and replication. Doing so will lessen the richness of our discipline’s analyses. It will inhibit the kind of innovative scholarship whose value arises ‘out of the inherent, absolute unpredictability of things, out of the sheer, brute fact that the results of human activity cannot be anticipated’ (Frank Knight, quoted in Greenblatt 2017). The Rudolphs recognized this, and of all their many intellectual gifts, it was this—the honouring of the human ability to understand and value the importance of surprise—that most influenced me.

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Before I began my empirical study of altruism, for example, I read all the works I could find on the topic, even biological works on altruism in Caenorhabditis elegans, a millimeter-long nematode or roundworm.27 I was convinced that altruism and self-interest would fall along a gemeinschaft und gesellschaft (community and society) continuum, with altruists being the communitarians.28 In fact, as I later discovered through my empirical analysis, however, it was the Nazis who most closely resembled communitarians. But theirs was a closed community; anyone outside the community of concern was expendable, subhuman, not entitled to the good treatment reserved for the in-group. Similarly, my on-going research on how people keep their humanity intact during war left me taken aback, unprepared to find—to give but one example—that hopelessness and fatalism could constitute effective survival tactics (Monroe 2015). While the kind of open mind that allows one to analyse data free of pre-conceived notions is probably the hallmark of any good scholar, and draws on all kinds of personality traits that are innate and not inculcated by any one professor, it was the Rudolphs who encouraged me to trust this sense that something else was going on, to trust my instincts and look elsewhere when traditional wisdom did not capture the reality that interested me.29 To this day, I love it when I give a talk on something and someone in the audience raises a question that I have not already thought about in some way. That’s the good stuff, and Lloyd and Susanne were fabulous at it. I conclude by offering just one very sweet personal illustration of this. During my fourth year at Chicago, I house-sat for David Bevington, a professor in the English department. David had a huge, three-storey home on Blackstone, with a study on the third floor and an adjoining room filled with books about his subject: Shakespearean literature. My thesis could not compete with David’s closet, lined with shelves stocked with records of Elizabethan music, or his history books, not to mention the complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED) spread out on a desk in the middle of David’s huge study. I listened to David’s music, perused his history books, and sat reading the OED for hours. I used to joke that I got nothing at all done those six months. Everyone always laughed when I told the story, as did I. Except Susanne. When I repeated this lament to her, ‘I did no work at all. Did absolutely nothing for six months!’ Susanne smiled her sweet, little smile and said, ‘Nothing except make yourself an educated person.’

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It was a typical Susanne remark: pithy, going right to the heart of the matter, and designed to help you see something about yourself, or the world, that you had not known before. There were so many instances of this in what later became a cherished friendship with two remarkable teachers and human beings. Most students of the Rudolphs probably have similar stories, for another thing I cherished about the Rudolphs was their rare ability to make each person feel that they were special. The regard the Rudolphs had for the art of teaching, the importance of careful analysis and thoughtful debate, based on facts carefully collected and analysed, followed honestly without regard for where they may take you, is something of eternal value. For me, it is the essence of education. The tremendous respect the Rudolphs brought to intellectual debate, even when a student’s argument was sloppy, continues to inspire me. However, it was their ability to see, and to then help you see, things no one else saw that still bowls me over. I was so fortunate that I wandered into their class on India in the spring of 1969. The Rudolphs didn’t just change the way I viewed comparative politics but the way I viewed the entire world. I was immensely privileged to have known these extraordinary scholars, teachers, and human beings. It is an honour to be able to acknowledge my debt to them here publicly, and to add my voice to the many others telling of our gratitude, respect, affection, and love for both Lloyd and Susanne.

Endnotes 1. See Vivian Schmidt’s chapter for a lovely discussion of twentieth-century social science that formed the context for the Rudolphs’ work. 2. Note the chapters titled ‘The Fear of Cowardice, Gandhi and the New Courage’, ‘Self-Control and Political Potency’, ‘This-Worldly Asceticism and Political Modernization’, and ‘The Private Origins of Public Obligation’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006). 3. In her preface, Hochschild (2016) discusses her desire to understand what was going on with the Right by getting at their deep story, what it felt like to be them. These are themes that the Rudolphs understood and honoured, and which contemporary political science ignores at its peril, as did virtually all of the specialists in American politics I knew in the 2016 election. 4. I remember at the time being struck that Tocqueville (1955) spent over 20 years researching and writing the book which comes in at roughly 220 pages. He puts most of the details in the notes, which run 78 pages (depending on the

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edition). Concise writing was another of the things the Rudolphs emphasized, with take-home exam questions limited to five pages per answer. 5. This discussion is drawn from ‘Chloe and Nicole and the Elephant in the Parlor: Essays on Ethics and Identity’, Kristen R. Monroe, unpublished manuscript. 6. Of course we can choose not to exercise our imagination and many people do just that. They choose to stay within the confines of their own experience, not asking what it would be like to have been born into a different circumstance, to fail to hear the cries and suffering of others, or to be inspired and aspire for a better world than the one they know through their own personal experience. The inability of otherwise good people to be able to imagine and empathize with others also carries moral consequences, just as the ability to understand the perspective of others relates to growth in our moral development. 7. There are different versions of this story. 8. The origins of this quote are not clear, nor is the quote itself. According to some sources, Kennedy said: ‘There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask  why? I dream of things that never were, and ask  why not? Kennedy later stated that he was quoting  George Bernard Shaw. In Back to Methuselah, Shaw has a serpent say: ‘You see things; and you say, “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?”’.  John F. Kennedy used this phrase in a 1963 (28 June) visit to Ireland. In addressing the Irish Dail, he said: ‘George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life, “Other people, he said, see things and say why? But I dream things that never were and I say, why not?”’  In an address on YouTube, Edward Kennedy further paraphrased the quote in his eulogy to Robert Kennedy (8 June 1968): ‘Some men see things as they are and say  why? I dream things that never were and say  why not?’ (Helmer 1963). The section on moral imagination comes from an unpublished manuscript, ’Chloe and Nicole and the Elephant in the Parlor: Essays on Ethics and Identity’. 9. The founder was Jeanne N. Knutson of the Department of Psychiatry and Bio-behavioural Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles. 10. Two prime examples of this are Bill Riker and Herb Simon, both of whom have articles in two of my edited volumes, The Economic Approach to Politics (1991) and Contemporary Empirical Political Theory (1997). In perhaps a weak moment, I got Bill to confess that rational choice theory was actually about psychology. See Vivien Schmidt’s excellent chapter in this volume on the trends in political science during this time. 11. Bill Kristol tweeted (11 January 2018): ‘Two weeks ago a 26-year old soldier raced repeatedly into a burning Bronx apartment building, saving four people before he died in the flames. His name was Pvt. Emmanuel Mensah and he immigrated from Ghana, a country Donald Trump apparently thinks

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produces very subpar immigrants.’ This is the kind of individual who receives the Carnegie Hero Award, often posthumously. 12. The Heart of Altruism assumed this, and was turned down—not even sent out for review by the University of Chicago editor—because, as he later told me: ‘You assume emotions enter into the thought process and all the psychologists told me reason is separate from emotions.’ Tryneski later conceded he had been wrong, but this was after extensive experimental work had convinced most psychologists that emotions influence how we reason about politics in all kinds of subtle ways, at every stage of the decision-making process. Again, the Rudolphs were ahead of the curve. 13. Between July 1993 and 31 July 1994, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) broadcast racist propaganda against moderate Hutus, Belgians, the UN mission UNAMIR, but mostly against Tutsis, whom they described as ‘cockroaches’. RTLM called on all Hutus to get ready and arm themselves because ‘the cockroaches are coming to get you’. These radio broadcasts are credited with mobilizing the people, and probably accounted for nearly 10 per cent of the deaths (Fujii 2009). 14. This represents a shift in interest from why people help others to how people themselves recover. 15. Prime examples are Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo. 16. This analysis comes from the conclusion of A Darkling Plain: Stories of Conflict and Humanity during War (Monroe 2015). 17. Both Adler (1924, 1956 [1927], and 2002 [1931]) and Bettelheim (1979 [1960]) emphasize this. 18. Such extreme experiences can also impart a sense of solidarity for people who underwent them together. 19. The complex relationship of fatalism, hope, and survival is discussed in a wide variety of fields, from Spinoza’s philosophical treatise on ethics (2002 [1677]) to contemporary work on stress in the workplace. 20. This is a hypothesis to be checked in future work. 21. For those interested in the narrative technique, see work by Molly Andrews of the Centre for Narrative Analysis at the University of East London. Her numerous books trace the development of narrative, its philosophical foundations, and how to use it as a method. 22. So, for example, Nehru and Jinnah (Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan) both legitimately saw different facts as more salient than others and constructed different stories for where India could go after Independence. We find different stories in the USA today where Trump supporters see themselves victimized by identity-politics, foreigners, and immigrants who take away their

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jobs, and by coastal elites who care little about ordinary people in small town America. Trump despisers do not share this narrative, finding the attack on big governments misguided, fears of immigrants xenophobic or racist, and find Trump bombastic, narcissistic, and devoid of respect for truth. The stories the two groups tell about the reality of the 2016 election, or even the last 50 years of American history, differ significantly. 23. Let me return to the role of stories in political analysis, and suggest how it led me to the concept of border crossers. The Rudolphs’ use of literature during an introductory course on India, taught in the spring of 1969, focused on Passage to India. They argued that Lawrence finds the mother, the one person who had tried the hardest to bridge the two cultures, the Anglo culture with its cold, analytical, emphasis on reason and the Indian culture with its vibrant lush emotionality. She dies on her way back to England, halfway between India and England. Their later work on the diaries of Amar Singh also inquired about people who bridge the gap between two different worlds. I found the concept of border crossers brilliant and insightful. I took my rescuers as those who could move back and forth between two worlds, the ugly world of the Holocaust, in which Nazis killed innocent people for no good reason, and a world where all human beings could be valued. What can such people teach us? Can they help us disentangle the two mindsets, akin to translating between two different moral languages? Such work is rarely done in ethics, or even in moral psychology, which seems fixated on experiments or dry philosophical treatises. The Rudolphs showed me a much richer intellectual world, one highly interdisciplinary, in which a good researcher follows the clues, wherever they lead. This is not easy, and this particular gift cost me a lot, when I had to dive into linguistic theory to understand how people categorized others differently, or into evolutionary psychology or neurobiology when I had to figure out if something biochemical actually occurs during altruistic acts, or into arcane political theory when I had to ask if perhaps Adam Smith and the original moral sense theorists were correct, and we all have an innate predisposition towards good or evil, just as we have a predisposition to learning language or finding certain smells appealing and others repugnant. 24. Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh (2012 [1944]: Book I, Chapter 2). 25. See Appendix A (Monroe 2004) for how narrative helps us understand moral choices made by people during war. 26. While I support sharing data and research transparency, DA-RT needs to be implemented with greater care, especially for qualitative research. DA-RT needs better protocols to assure that pursuit of transparency does not impinge upon the collection and reasonable use of qualitative data and its important contributions to political science. Among the issues that need to be addressed are: (1) the protection of human subjects; (2) provision of adequate journal space to publish complete analysis of qualitative data; (3) attention to the

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ethical issues of cleaning data before sharing it; and (4) protecting the anonymity of interviewees, especially those from vulnerable populations. 27. ‘The Worm’s Altruistic Suicide’. Posted: 11 October 2012. Author: Jean Mendoza. ‘Caenorhabditis elegans, a millimeter-long nematode or roundworm, has been poked and prodded, dissected and inspected. Every cell in its body has been mapped, the circuitry of its neurons traced, and its entire genome sequenced. For the past 50 years, it has been the experimental animal of choice, the subject of over 15,000 articles on everything from genetics to drug development. Biologically speaking, we know more about this animal than any other in the world—including ourselves. But for all that we know about C. elegans, one aspect remains a mystery. In an abnormal birth process called matricide, the offspring eat and kill their mother. Researchers have shown that this unusual phenomenon may in fact be an evolutionary adaptation. By committing suicide for the sake of her young, the mother provides them the opportunity to become dauers, larvae that are incredibly stress-resistant.’ 28. ‘Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft’ translates roughly as community and association, that is people whose lives are organized along communitarian lines versus those who associate by choice (Tonnies 1957/1887). 29. I also credit Joseph Cropsey and David Easton for encouraging me to take leaps into the unknown.

References Alfred Adler. 1924. The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1927/1998. Understanding Human Nature. Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden Foundation. ———. 1931/2002. What Life Could Mean to You. New York: Oneworld Publications. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1960/1979. The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age. New York: Avon Books. ———. 1956. The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler: A Systematic Presentation in Selections from His Writings, edited by Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher. New York: Harper Perennial. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1856/1955. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. First edition. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Doubleday, Random House. De Waal, Frans B.M. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fujii, Lee Ann. 2009. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2007. ‘Can We Ever Master King Lear?’ New York Review of Books 64 (3) (23 February): 34–6. Available at https://www.nybooks.

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com/articles/2017/02/23/can-we-ever-master-king-lear/. Last accessed on 6 February 2020. Helmer, Reenberg. 1963. ‘John F. Kennedy in Dublin, Ireland, June 28th 1963 (Part Two)’. Filmed [June 1963]. YouTube, 6:45. Posted [March 2009]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ADeazX9blw. Last accessed on 6 February 2020. Hochschild, Arlie. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land. Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. Monroe, Kristen Renwick. 1984. Presidential Popularity and the Economy. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. ———, ed. 1991. The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action. New York: HarperCollins. ———. 1996. The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———, ed. 1997. Contemporary Empirical Political Theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2004. The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice during the Holocaust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2015. A Darkling Plain: Stories of Conflict and Humanity during War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. ‘The Rush to Transparency: DA-RT and the Potential Dangers to Qualitative Research.’ Perspectives on Politics 16 (1): 141–8. Nowotny, Helga. 2015. ‘The Radical Openness of Science and Innovation: Why Uncertainty Is Inherent in the Openness Towards the Future’.  Science and Society 16 (12): 1601–4. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1984. The Modernity of Tradition. Political Development in India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rudolph, Susanne H., and Lloyd I. Rudolph. 1993. ‘Modern Hate: How Ancient Animosities Get Invented’. The New Republic 208 (12) (22 March): 24–9. Rudolph, Susanne H., Lloyd I. Rudolph, and Mohan Singh Kanota. 2002. Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary: A Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1957 [1887]. Community and Society. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.  East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press. Vance, J.D. 2016. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis. New York: HarperCollins. Waugh, Evelyn. 1944/2012. Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. New York: Back Bay Books, Little Brown. 

5

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs? The Impact of Class Differentiation in Rural India

christophe jaffrelot and kalaiyarasan a.

A

mong the many areas of interest of the Rudolphs, their political economy of rural India has generated some of their most remarkable intellectual achievements. Analysing the transformation of Indian agriculture after 1947, they identify four successive types of development strategies in their masterpiece, In Pursuit of Lakshmi. They associate each one with a specific social category, combining political economy and political sociology. The first sequence after Independence is by far the most important: the abolition of the zamindars, jagirdars, and other intermediaries, that is known as India’s land reform, transformed agrarian relations by shifting the locus of rural power from feudal landlords to market-oriented independent cultivators—whom the Rudolphs call ‘bullock capitalists’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 115)—in contrast to the tractor capitalists who were often ex-intermediaries. While the latter, on average, retained more than 15 acres large holdings, the former owned only 2.5 to 15 acres, but that was sufficient to have something to sell; all the more so after the second strategy that eventuated in the Green Revolution and which resulted in greater productivity, especially in northern and western India, in wheat and sugar cane growing areas (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 323, 337). The third and fourth strategies were two variants of pro-poor policies—populist under Indira Gandhi in the early/mid-1970s and more investment-oriented during the Janata Party regime (1977–9). But the Rudolphs observed in the late 1980s

Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan A., Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs? The Impact of Class Differentiation in Rural India. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190125011.003.0005

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(when their book was completed) that none of these pro-poor strategies affected the ‘bullock capitalists’ who continued to prosper. This good fortune was partly due to their sense of organization and their capacity of mobilization, that became evident in 1978 when hundreds of thousands of them came to Delhi to celebrate the birthday of their main leader, Charan Singh. This strength allowed them to obtain from the state remunerative prices for agricultural commodities  (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 360). According to the Rudolphs, ‘bullock capitalists’ were also successful because they were able to subsume class politics in rural India. They were the most militant economic class and also the most mobilizable agrarian class in rural India.1 Their greatest achievement was the political bargain on prices and subsidies in the agricultural sector. Their leaders—including Charan Singh—emphasized the opposition between the urban and the rural, between  ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’, sidelining socio-economic divisions within villages. Singh claimed that he was representing all the ‘kisans’, the peasants, minimizing social stratifications within village India—in spite of the fact that he did not pay any attention to the landless labourers who worked in the fields of others (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 335).2 In that sense, ‘the new agrarianism’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 358) which emerged in the 1960–70s was a form of populism, as D.N. Dhanagare argued convincingly (2015). The Rudolphs explain that ‘bullock capitalists’ could get away with it because, in spite of rising inequalities due to the Green Revolution, class politics never crystallized in India’s countryside—contrary to the leftist intellectuals’ predictions.3 The Rudolphs paid attention to class in a different way. The first section of the first chapter of In Pursuit of Lakshmi is titled ‘Class Politics’. But for them, in the politics of rural India, class was less relevant than ‘sectors’, a word the Rudolphs use to designate the peasantry. This approach remained pertinent after the book was published, as evident from the manner in which Indian peasants were mobilized—almost irrespective of class—for pressurizing the state behind unions such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union. In 1989 one million of them camped in Delhi.4 In the wake of the Rudolphs, other scholars then studied what came to be known as ‘the farmers’ movement’ whose main targets were not the landlords but the state because it was responsible for fixing the prices of most of the commodities and for subsidizing

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electricity (used for irrigation) and inputs (such as fertilizers) (Brass 1995; Varshney 1996). However, caste staged a comeback in the political economy of rural India in the 1990s, in the framework of the Mandal moment: Other Backward Classes (OBCs) mobilized in order to get quotas (Jaffrelot 2003). In 1987, the Rudolphs had noticed: ‘Overlapping bullock capitalists, an economic category, were the “backward classes” (read castes), a status group that came to age politically in the 1970s’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 50). In fact, by the 1990s, OBCs and bullock capitalists overlapped less and less: the former were part of the lower Shudras (Yadavs in north India, for instance) whereas the latter often belonged to dominant castes5, as upper Shudras (such as the Jats in Haryana, Rajasthan, and west Uttar Pradesh) or even upper castes (such as the Rajputs in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the Bhumihars in Bihar, and so on). Certainly, the former were fighting against the latter for economic (class-based) reasons, but in the name of caste—a category, that the Rudolphs had studied at the beginning of their career6 and which had become important again. The dominant castes, be they Jats, Rajputs, or Bhumihars, resisted the mobilization of the OBCs in rural India, as well as in towns and cities. However, this was in vain: lower castes benefitted from new avenues for social mobility in the bureaucracy in the 1990s, thanks to quotas introduced by V. P. Singh, and then in the university, in the 2000s, thanks to similar quotas introduced by the Manmohan Singh government. This policy of affirmative action, which had already contributed to the making of a tiny Dalit middle class, helped OBCs to rise to power (via regional parties such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal [RJD] of Lalu Prasad Yadav and the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav) at the expense of the dominant castes. While OBCs and, to a lesser extent, Dalits were catching up, in the mid-2010s dominant castes members started to ask for quotas too, in the context of a new kind of jobless growth.7 All the more so as the jobs which were created were often badly paid and insecure—the proportion of ‘contract workers’ was now above 35 per cent according to the Labour Bureau (Ministry of Labour and Employment 2015, 38). Upper Shudras of the dominant castes, including Jats, Marathas, and Patels, who used to reign over their villages but were now longing for jobs in the city asked the state to reclassify them as OBCs in order to get access to job quotas in the public sector. The fact

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that they mobilized reservations in the name of their ‘backwardness’ reconfirmed that caste identities were malleable indeed.8 To throw some light on the movements that the youth of the three caste groups mentioned above launched in the mid-2010s, this chapter analyses the transformations that rural India has experienced since In Pursuit of Lakshmi. The ownership rights in land and economic classes that have resulted from these movements have drastically changed rural India. The decline in the average size of landholding is an indication of fragmentation and internal differentiation of ‘bullock capitalists’. In addition, the rural agrarian structures also have seen a new form of differentiation along caste lines—status groups in the Rudolphs’ conception—in the wake of positive discrimination benefitting the Dalits and after Mandal, the OBCs. In addition, the effect of democratic politics based in part on horizontal mobilizations of lower castes after Mandal has also weakened the unified mobilization under the rubric of ‘bullock capitalists’. As a result, bullock capitalists have responded to this new circumstance by changing their mobilization strategies. Certainly ‘kisan politics’ shows some resilience, peasants mobilizing against the state about the price of commodities or inputs, but this sector is subjected to new tensions because of the dominant castes’ demand for reservations. Both types of mobilization are articulated by the same people who are Januslike: these peasants by profession are also dominant castes members. This is not new. What is new is the fact that this group is experiencing some socio-economic differentiation along class lines: those who have initiated the recent protests are those who, within this group, are losing out visà-vis OBCs (and even some Dalits) and lag behind other caste-fellows. Certainly, dominant castes remain more advanced than OBCs and Dalits, but to compare dominant castes and OBCs and Dalits as blocks is not sufficient anymore because an intra-caste socio-economic differentiation has become a key variable for explaining the current mobilizations.

The Changing Face of Kisans’ Mobilizations: From Economics to Reservations Fighting for Land, Good Prices, and Subsidies The ‘Bharat vs. India’ motto remained relevant in the twenty-first century since the urban ‘sector’ of the country was the main winner of

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the post-1991 economic liberalization, at the expense of the peasantry. Indeed, some of the recent kisans’ mobilizations have mostly resulted from socio-economic trends related to the post-1991 growth pattern: since then, village India has been lagging behind cities. The best data documenting these diverging trajectories are to be found in the National Sample Survey’s reports—which are not very frequent, unfortunately. In 1993–4, the average monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) was Rs 281 in rural India and Rs 458 in urban India. Not only was the gap between the two was already large, but they rose to respectively Rs 772 (+174 per cent) and Rs 1,472 (+221 per cent) in 2007–8, which means that the gap between urban and rural jumped from 63 to 91 percentage points. The gap diminished somewhat between 2007–8 and 2011–12, with rural MPCE reaching Rs 1,430 (+85 per cent) as an average and the urban MPCE rising to 2,630 (+79 per cent), but it remained more than 20 percentage points higher than what it was in 1993–4 at 84 percentage points. In 2008, the ‘rural-urban gap’ was at 45 per cent in India versus 10 per cent for China and Indonesia (Kharsai 2016). This is partly due to the slow growth of agriculture over the last decade. Over the years 2005–6/2011–12 the average annual growth rate of industry at constant 2004–5 prices has been 7.5 per cent, while services grew at an ever-quicker pace, 9.95 per cent, whereas agriculture lagged behind at 3.8 per cent. While we don’t have accurate data since 2011–12, it is unlikely that this trend would reverse, given the policy shocks such as demonetization, stagnation in MNREGA, and collapse in international farm prices. Instead, the recent leaked data of the 75th round of NSSO for 2017–18 suggests that the rural -urban gap has further widened during 2012–18. The rural MPCE declined from Rs 1,430 in 2011–12 to Rs 1,304 in 2017–18 (8.8 per cent decline) while it rose from Rs 2,630 to Rs 3,155 in urban India (2.6 per cent increase) (Subramanian 2019). In the following years, 2013–19, the average agricultural GDP growth rate was 3.1 per cent, much lower than the average GDP growth rate (6.7 per cent). This growth in agriculture was also driven by noncrop sectors, such as livestock. The average growth of crop sector, which accounts for two-thirds of the agricultural sector GDP, was 0.3 per cent, the lowest in two decades (Himanshu 2020). These figures reflect different factors. First, the size of the holdings continues to shrink: the average land owned by peasants fell from

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0.725  ha to 0.592 ha between 2002–3 and 2012–13. As a result, the proportion of those owning less than one ha increased from 79.7 per cent to 82.8 per cent (Yadu and Satheesha 2016, 20–1). Since ‘a farm household needs to have at least 1 hectare of land to make ends meet’, over half of the farmers are indebted: ‘the average loan amount outstanding for a farm household in India today is Rs 47,000’, not a small amount (Rukmini 2017). Secondly, irrigation has stagnated with less than half of Indian farmland irrigated, partly because of the groundwater crisis: the level of water tables fell by 65 per cent in 10 years (Bahri 2016). Thirdly, rural India suffers from what Ashok Gulati calls an ‘urban consumer bias’ (Gulati 2015). This bias found expression in one obsession: the price of food. To neutralize any risk of inflation on that front, the growth rate of rural wages has been limited—in 2015, it was the lowest in 10 years (and lower than the inflation rate) (Surabhi 2015). That was related to the squeezing of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) programme, a right to work programme introduced in rural India in 2005, that was accused of pushing up the rural wages.9 The farmers perceived this act was working against their interest. Because, it had pushed the wage component in inputs costs of the cultivation. An analysis by Jean Drèze shows that the growth rate for agricultural wages for men increased to 2.7 per cent per year and for women to 3.7 per cent per year during 2005–6 to 2010–11 as compared to 0.1 per cent per year for men and negative for women in the pre-MGNREGA (2000–1 to 2005–6) (Mann and Ramesh 2013). However, wages, as an input, were less targeted than the real ‘danger’: food prices. To spare the urban consumers, they remained very low and the government even precipitated food prices deflation. One of the techniques it used was to let imports of food product submerge the Indian market. Soyabean was a case in point in 2017: ‘India was flooded with cheap soyabean oil imports as global oil prices dropped low enough to make domestic production unviable for local players. The maximum duty that the government can impose on the imports is 45 per cent, but it chose to keep the rate at just 12.5 per cent’ (Chari 2017). In this context, peasant movements multiplied, but most of them were sporadic and remained confined to the state level, not only because of the deepening of federalism till the mid-2010s, but also because peasant parties could not retain a pan Indian dimension, the same way as during the Charan Singh years: their outreach was affected

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by urbanization and economic liberalization: urbanization meant that villagers did not matter as much as before in electoral terms and liberalization policies unfolded themselves at the expense of the traditional protections rural India had benefited before. The reform of the electricity sector in Gujarat—one of the most urbanized states of India—offers a good example of these developments. In this state, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), the peasant union of RSS, opposed the decision of Chief Minister Narendra Modi to implement the 10 October 2000 award of the Gujarat Electricity Regulatory Commission (GERC) intending to hike electricity prices. The BKS, the largest peasants’ union in Gujarat, founded in 1979 (ironically by one of Modi’s former mentors, the RSS senior figure D. P. Thengadi), filed no less than seven petitions against the proposal because of the rise in the electricity price it implied (Times of India, 2003a). All previous governments had postponed the implementation of the award, but Modi was more decisive, because of a serious fiscal crisis and his larger plans for economic reform. He introduced close to a 250 per cent hike in the power tariff. In July 2003, the BKS asked farmers ‘to boycott the payment of all new bills’, and later the organization would mobilize huge crowds (Times of India, 2003a). In September 2003, more than 50,000 farmers took part in a rally at Gandhinagar where the BKS leader, Prafull Sentajalia ‘criticised Modi for following in the footsteps of Pandit Nehru by giving more importance to industry rather than agriculture’ (Times of India, 2003b). Three months later, the BKS was ‘forced to vacate its state-level office, located in the Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA)’s quarters for the past eight years’. The national secretary of the BKS, Jivanbhai Patel, reacted strongly to this decision which forced the organization to work from a tent: Modi has triggered a hornet’s nest. He will pay for his act. If he has come to power with our support, now he should know we can even push him out of power. He should not undermine our strength. … We think our tough stand on the farmers’ [electricity] rate has irked Modi. Lately, it had become impossible to talk to him, quite unlike former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, who always used to give us an audience, despite our differences with him. (Times of India, 2004a)

This movement, indeed, was partly over-determined by the fight between Keshubhai Patel and Narendra Modi, the former using the

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BKS against the latter. This agitation took a dramatic turn when a BKS senior leader, Laljibhai Patel, started a fast. On 23 January 2004, the RSS intervened. A team of five mediators, including Ramdas Aggarwal (a Rajya Sabha member from Rajasthan), Madandas Devi (the RSS joint general secretary in charge of relations between the Sangh and the BJP), Bal Apte, and Arun Jaitley (a senior BJP member, then a member of the Vajpayee government) came to Ahmedabad—to almost no avail (Times of India, 2004b). Narendra Modi refused to dilute his stand on the power tariff, but offered compensation: the state government would take waters from the Narmada canal via 15 pipes to fill dams, which would save 2,000 MW of power to be used to extract underground irrigation water (Times of India, 2004c). Laljibhai Patel ended his hunger strike and the mediators returned to Delhi. But the deal made sense in the long run only. The BKS leaders were so bitter that they chose not help the BJP in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, in which it returned poor results. Soon after these elections, the general secretary of the organization declared: Modi’s ego has been the main reasons for BJP’s poor showing. … Modi’s repugnant utterances, anonymous advertisements, show off during festivals, flaunting of public money to gather crowds, anti-rural mindset and false promises. … Modi has even lost the right to resign on moral grounds. He should be just dumped. This is the collective demand of BKS. And this should be done understanding people’s feelings, and particularly that of Gujarat farmers. (Times of India, 2004e)

The BKS has remained a determined opponent of the Modi government and has continued to arraign its policy regarding electricity. In 2007, when the government claimed that the situation was rapidly improving on the power front, the BKS regretted that ‘the state government has passed on the burden of shortage of electricity supply of nearly 600 MW from the western grid onto the farmers’ (Times of India, 2007a). The BKS also accused the state electricity board of cutting off power to farmers’ water pumps after complaints of meter tampering and thefts (Times of India, 2007b). While the situation improved markedly in the early years of the present decade, the BKS continued to argue with the state government about electricity. In 2011, targeting a governance issue—when Narendra Modi had adopted ‘good governance’ as his motto—it claimed that ‘3.75 lakh applications of farmers

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seeking electricity connections have been awaiting clearance’ and that the way power was distributed to the farmers was incoherent (Business Standard, 2011).10 Second, the BKS attacked the Modi government regarding farmers’ suicides. In 2007, the General Secretary of the organization lamented: ‘The police stations do not register farmers’ suicide deaths. These suicides are brushed aside as resulting from domestic problems. But the problems arise because of the farmers’ plight in rural Gujarat’ (Times of India, 2007b). These accusations were made at a time when the Modi government claimed ‘the outgoing fiscal year’s agricultural production has been a stupendous Rs 32,000 crore.’ Commenting upon these achievements, the president of the BKS, Prafull Senjalia said: ‘These are all fudged figures’ (Times of India, 2007). Last but not least, the BKS initiated several agitations to protest against the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Special Investment Regions (SIRs), which resulted in the granting of land to industrialists at the expense of farmers. The organization protested against the Mandal–Becharaji SIR which, in its view, would divert 50,880 ha of fertile land for the use of industrial concerns such as Maruti (Tehelka, 2013).11 The story of the peasant movements in Modi’s Gujarat is revealing of a new balance of power: in contrast to the heydays of kisan politics, farmers are not in a position to resist public policies which are largely overdetermined by a pro-urban bias in favour of industry and services.12 But the more peasants are affected by these policies, the more they try to mobilize. In the spring of 2017—while Tamil Nadu farmers were already protesting for months—their mobilization reached meta-regional dimensions with one common demand: the implementation of the M.S. Swaminathan Commission report which recommended in 2004–6, among other things,  minimum support price for grains.13 From March 2017 onwards, farmers of Maharashtra asked for better prices for onions and other pulses; in Himachal Pradesh they did the same regarding tomatoes; in Punjab and Haryana, about potatoes and maize; in Rajasthan, garlic; in Gujarat, groundnuts; in Madhya Pradesh, soyabeans; in Andhra, Telangana, and Karnataka, chilli, et cetera (Chari 2017; on the case of Haryana, see Dey 2017). In April, the strike of the Maharashtrian farmers and their march to Mumbai were so massive that

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on 3 June, the BJP government agreed to a Rs 30,000 crore loan waiving. But then the movement spread to neighbouring Madhya Pradesh where five demonstrators were killed by the police in Mandsaur district (Iyer and Shaikh 2017). In reaction, peasants from other states, including Punjab and Haryana joined the agitation. In Punjab, seven farmer unions started to agitate as a sign of solidarity and for better price for their produce as well as a loan waiver.14 Farmers also agitated in favour of loan waiving in Haryana—where the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) orchestrated the protest (Siwach 2017). Farmers mobilized because of contingent events—such as the Mandsaur killing and the impact of demonetization that badly affected rural India in 2016–17—but their agitation fit in the traditional pattern of kisan politics. However, in contrast to what happened in the previous decades, their mobilizations did not bear fruit. First, the minimum support prices were not upgraded at a good level, in contrast to Modi’s promises in 2014. That was particularly problematic in respect to pulses, the products in which the poor farmers specialize. In Mandsaur district, the failure of the state government to protect the floor price of the pulses acted as a catalyst, farmers demonstrating for suitable prices and loan waiver. Second, peasants got only one thing: loan waiving and in some states only, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh mostly. But this relief was problematic. Not only the procedure of reimbursement was very bureaucratic and the amount of the loan waiving sometimes minimal (Rs 10 to 500), but only a fraction (about one third) of the small and marginal farmers have access to institutional credit: ‘the banks do not lend money to the others because they are too poor and have to turn to the money lenders … who do not waive loans’ (Bajpai 2017). More importantly, loan waiving is only a temporary relief if prices remain low (because in that case peasants have to make debts again) and, in the short run, as M.S. Swaminathan said: ‘Without repaying debts, farmers won’t get fresh kharif credit. This is why they want loan waivers as well as remunerative procurement price’ (Saldanha and Salve 2017). Why has the 2017 mobilization given so little results? It has something to do with the social profile of the new political hegemon, the BJP, whose support base is even more urban than that of the Congress (Jaffrelot and Kumar 2015). The ‘urban bias’ of the Modi government was obvious before the 2017 mobilization, as evident from its attempt

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to amend the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act in 2015 in favour of the industrialists. When he had to abandon it because of the opposition in parliament, the prime minister invited the states to do the reform themselves and the BJP-ruled states have naturally been the first to change the law in order to make the acquisition of land easier to industrialists—to the chagrin of farmers.15 Similarly, budget cuts affected  agriculture and rural areas, with reduced spending on some crucial interventions such as the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana and the winding up of the Backward Regions Grant Fund. This was accompanied by reduced expenditure on irrigation schemes, such as the Integrated Watershed Management Programme and Accelerated Irrigation Benefits and Flood Management Programme (Himanshu 2016). Even the supposedly pro-rural India 2016 budget was not that greatly in favour of the farmers. The prime minister announced that he would ensure that farmer income doubles in the next five years, but the policies reflected in the budget did not match with this objective. The finance minister had made the 127 per cent rise of the allocation for agriculture by transferring the subsidy on farm loans from the accounting head of the Department of Financial Services to the Department of Agriculture (Guruswamy 2016). If we look at a longer trend, the neglect of agriculture under the BJP becomes evident. The budget for ministry of agriculture increased about 26 per cent per annum during 2004–13 while it in creased only 8.7 per cent per annum during 2014–19. Also, the actual allocation in agriculture has been short of budgeted allocation since 2014 (Himanshu 2019). Not only is the BJP not responsive to the kisans’ demands, but another key component of the Sangh Parivar, the BKS, plays an ambiguous role. This peasant union is facing a dilemma: it cannot remain aloof of the peasants’ agitation without losing its credibility among the farmers, but it cannot overtly attack RSS-supported BJP governments (Mohan 2016). In many states, the BKS has tried to negotiate quickly with the BJP governments in order to defuse tensions. Madhya Pradesh is a case in point (Iyer and Shaikh 2017). As a result, peasants have lost one of their previously most determined advocates. To sum up: if the issues at stake remain the same, the ‘bullock capitalists’ of the 21st century are not mobilizing as effectively and in a sustainable manner their fathers of the 1970s and 1980s, not only because of changes in their organizational landscape, but also because

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of the lack of responsiveness of the government. They mostly got some loan waiving and nothing else. The objective causes and the process that converts such causes into reasons described by the Rudolphs in ‘Determinants and Varieties of Agrarian Mobilization’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1984, 281–344) have changed now. As a result, in several states, bullock capitalist’s attention shifted from kisan politics to the old quota politics, that used to be the speciality of the OBCs.

Quotas for Dominant Castes? The main demand of the ‘bullock capitalists’ of the dominant castes is simple: they want to be classified as OBCs in order to have access to reservations in the public sector, something the state could not do, in most of the cases, because quotas already reached the saturation point, 49 per cent, allowed by the Supreme Court in its previous judgements. One of the reasons why some ‘bullock capitalists’ want now to become OBCs has to do with the fact that their children do not want to farm any more. On the basis of a Situation Assessment Survey of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), Bina Agarwal has shown that 40 per cent of Indian farmers did not like farming any more and she concludes : ‘We are facing not just a farmers’ crisis today, but also a crisis of farming families, whose children want non-farm jobs’  (Agarwal 2017). Nonfarm jobs, indeed, are what young Patels, Jats, Marathas, and Kapus are asking for in the street since 2015. The Patels were the first to agitate in 2015. In August, half a million of them demonstrated in Ahmedabad in order to have their caste listed among the Other Backward Classes under the leadership of young leaders such as Hardik Patel (22) (Jaffrelot 2016b, 1–15). The repression of their movement resulted in the death of nine activists. In January and February 2016, the Jats demonstrated for the same thing in Haryana: dozens of buses were set on fire, and the canal bringing water to Delhi was badly damaged. The army had to be deployed; eventually, 13 columns of soldiers supplemented 10 companies of the paramilitary. The Jats’ actions and the resulting repression of them resulted in more than 20 deaths. The Marathas of Maharashtra started their pro-reservation agitation in April 2016 after a young Maratha girl was allegedly raped by a Dalit. In contrast to the Jats, the Marathas opted for a completely nonviolent—and even silent—modus operandum. Rallies were organized

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at the district level in August–October, mobilizing a total of more than 1.2 million people. Kapus, another dominant caste, demonstrated similarly in Andhra Pradesh State: 400,000 people had mobilized on January 31 after agitators from the same caste, but resorting to a less peaceful modus operandi, burned a train in coastal Andhra. These moblizations are not only due to the decline of kisan politics and to the fact that the dominant castes are under the threat of OBCs (and sometimes Dalits) who are catching up in socio-economic terms, but also to the intracaste differentiation in terms of class. This analysis based on the India Human Development Survey (IHDS)—the only reliable source so far—allows us to bring class back in the picture, but from a perspective different from the Rudolphs.

Class versus Caste? The Relative Social Decline of the Dominant Castes and Their Socio-economic Differentiation In their analysis of the demand for quotas by Jats, Patels, and Marathas, Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran have argued that these ‘dominant groups, driven by anxieties and insecurities about maintaining their dominance in the new economy and due to a perception of marginalization, demand preferences for themselves because preferential policies work—they do benefit those who use them’ (Deshpande and Ramachandran 2017, 81). Indeed, some OBCs and even some Scheduled Castes (SCs) are catching up and pose a threat on the hegemony of these dominant castes in certain parts of the rural sector of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Haryana, as we will show in the next section. But the magnitude of the danger is unevenly distributed because the dominant castes are increasingly differentiated along class lines: for the base of the pyramid, marginalization is not a question of ‘perception’, it is a reality and in their case we beg to differ with Deshpande and Ramachandran when they argue that ‘the narrative of “the ground slipping beneath their feet” is largely based on perceptions and has little empirical support in the data’ (Deshpande and Ramachandran 2017, 82). We’ll provide the necessary empirical support from the same source, the two last rounds of the IHDS in the last section of this article.

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Are OBCs and Dalits Competing with Dominant Castes? Post-1991 economic growth in urban India, the post-Mandal reservations in jobs introduced by the V.P. Singh government in the 1990s, and then in education by the Manmohan Singh government in the 2000s offered mobility for Dalits and OBCs. We use here both the rounds (2004–5 and 2011–12) of the IHDS, done by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in collaboration with the University of Maryland to measure this mobility.16 The data provides a panel for 2004–5 and 2011–12 and one can thus trace a mobility of the identical households. In our sample 12,689 persons and 3,231 households are from Maharashtra, 6,575 persons and 1,689 households from Gujarat, and 7,036 persons and 1,744 persons from Haryana. The same sample is available for 2004–5, except the households which got split in 2011–12.17 The IHDS data allow us to compare the mobility of OBCs and SCs to Marathas, Patels, and Jats in terms of income, education and jobs. In all three cases, OBCs and SCs are catching up with some large segments of these dominant castes as evident from Table 5.1. Certainly, the average income of the three dominant castes under review is higher than that of the SCs and OBCs; in some cases they top the income pyramid even

Table 5.1

Performance of SCs and OBCs to dominant castes Caste groups

Education (% change)18 Jobs in % (salaried)

Gujarat

171.8

94.4

OBCs

Haryana 135.6

121.0

114.3

77.3

Dominant caste

71.1

38.3

69.9

SCs

27.5

26.8

19.3

OBCs

23.3

16.6

20.7

Dominant caste Mean income in INR (bottom 60%)19

Maharashtra

SCs

30.5

19.4

11.4

SCs

26,172

27,348

20,566

OBCs

28,581

23,692

31,027

Dominant caste

17,146

17,296

22,648

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

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over the Brahmins and business communities. But dominant castes— more than others—are differentiated along class lines. Therefore, we consider the income average of bottom 60 per cent of population in each of these groups, and compare them with the average income of the SCs and OBCs. Income In Maharashtra, the average per capita income of the Marathas is second only to the Brahmins at Rs 36,548 against Rs 47,427 in 2011–12 (see Figure 5.1). The other forward castes get only Rs 34,546 and the OBCs, Rs 28,580, while the SCs get Rs 26,172. The average income of Malis, the most upwardly mobile OBCs, is Rs 32,204. But the growth rate of the per capita income of the Marathas, at 167 per cent between 2004–5 and 2011–12, is far from being the highest: OBCs register the same percentage, but among them Malis have increased their average income by 239 per cent and Dalits by 177 per cent. Unlike Marathas, the Patels have even gained the top position in Gujarat in terms of annual per capita income. They’ve jumped from Rs 17,470 in 2004–5 to Rs 51,045 in 2011–12, as against the Brahmins, who were number one in 2004–5 with Rs 20,528 and have moved to the second position with Rs 44,144 (see Figure 5.2). The OBCs get Rs 23,692 which is lower than that of the SCs Rs 27,348. Like Malis in Maharashtra, Kolis in Gujarat have been the most dynamics with an average income of Rs 30,981 in 2011–12. Their income have gone up by 268 per cent during 2004–5 to 2011–12, while the figures for the Patels was ‘only’ 192 per cent, 214 per cent for the OBCs, and 174 per cent for the SCs. As in the case of Patels, the Jats’ average per capita income is higher than that of Brahmins but lower than that of the merchant communities in Haryana (see Figure 5.3). The average income of Jats’ is Rs 63,679 in 2011–12 while Brahmins gets Rs 60,509, the OBCs and SCs get respectively Rs 31,037 and 20,566. The Jats’ per capita income increased by 251 per cent during 2004–5 to 2011–12 while the corresponding income increase for the OBCs and SCs was respectively 168 per cent and 175 per cent. However, the increase in income of the Jats is not evenly distributed within this caste group but tilted towards to the top since the elite cornered most of the income. We will discuss the distribution of the income within castes in the next section.

ST s

5,979

17,502

25,156 9,529

i Ku nb

s SC

OB

9,445

10,674

Cs

l ai M 2004–5

Figure 5.1

26,172

28,581

32,204 9,491

15,344

35,264

37,255

Fo r

w ar d

13,933

ar at ha M

Br ah m in

50,000 45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0

44,638

Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan A.

19,492

140

2011–12

Annual per capita mean income across caste groups in Maharashtra (INR)

11,821

23,692 4,101

30,981

27,348 7,536

10,000

9,964

14,653

20,000

20,528

30,000

17,470

40,000

8,422

50,000

40,385

60,000

44,144

51,045

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

0 Patels

Brahmin Forward 2004–5

Figure 5.2

Kolis

SCs

OBCs

STs

2011–12

Annual per capita mean income across caste groups in Gujarat (INR)

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

60,000

10,000 0

Forward

Jats

Brahmins 2004–5

31,027 11,627

20,000

15,072

30,000

18,163

40,000

18,720

50,000

OBCs

20,566

70,000

7,489

80,000

141

60,509

90,000

63,679

79,506

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

SCs

2011–12

Figure 5.3 Annual per capita mean income across caste groups in Haryana (INR) Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

In sum, the average income of the SCs and OBCs are higher than the average income of bottom 60 per cent of all three dominant castes except in the case of SCs in Haryana. The average income of SCs and OBCs in Maharashtra are respectively of Rs 26,172 and Rs 28,581, while the bottom 60 per cent Maratha earns Rs 17,146. Similarly, the average SCs and OBCs earn respectively of Rs 27,348 and Rs 23,692 in Gujarat while the Patels from the bottom 60 per cent earn only Rs 17,296 which is 73 per cent of the average income of SCs and 63 per cent of that of the OBCs. The average income of bottom 60 per cent of Jats’ is Rs 22,648, which is 73 per cent of what the average OBC earns (Rs 31,027) in Haryana and 110 per cent average income of SCs (Rs 20,566). Education While dominant castes do well in terms of income, they systematically lag behind forward castes in terms of education. In Maharashtra, in 2011–12, the percentage of Brahmins who are graduates and above is about 26 per cent, against 8.1 per cent among the Marathas. Dalits

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stand at 5.1 per cent and OBCs at 7.6 per cent, but among the latter, the Malis have reached 9.5 per cent of graduates. During 2004–5 to 2011–12, Dalits and OBCs have gained at a faster rate in education. The percentage of graduates among Dalits in 2004–5 was 1.9 per cent and has more than doubled to 5.1 per cent in 2011–12. The corresponding figure for the OBCs was 3.5 per cent and has doubled to 7.6 per cent in 2011–12, while the figure for the Marathas was 4.6 per cent in 2004–5 and has come up to 8 per cent in 2011–12. Better access to higher education has been one of the main demands of the Marathas. They not only resent the rise of the OBCs and the Dalits in the educational system because of reservations, as we’ll see in the next section, but they cannot compete with upper castes because of their under representation in the English-medium colleges. As a result, Marathas have not benefitted as much as upper castes of the rise of the services, including IT, in the post-1991 liberalized India (see Table 5.2). And only the richest among them could profit by the policy of Sharad Pawar, when he was chief minister in the late 1980s–early 1990s, which consisted in promoting the export-oriented agriculturists. Patels are similarly affected by an uneven level of education, in spite of their increasing presence in costly private universities. The percentage of graduates among the Patels is 9.8 per cent, against 19.1 per cent for Brahmins and 11.7 per cent for other forward castes (see Table 5.3). The OBCs and SCs are much below, at 2.4 per cent and 4.8 per cent respectively. The OBCs have gained in education during 2004–5 to 2011–12. The percentage of graduates among the OBCs was abysmally low at 1.1 per cent in 2004–5 and has gone up 2.4 per cent in 2011–12. Although it appears a marginal increment in terms of percentage points, but the actual number of graduates have doubled among the OBCs during this period. The SCs have also doubled their percentage of graduates from 2.7 per cent in 2004–5 to 4.8 per cent in 2011–12. For the Patels, the percentage of graduates was 8 per cent in 2004–5 and has gone up to 9.8 per cent. The SCs are doing good as compared to the OBCs in education as the percentage of graduates among them is higher than that of the latter. The mean income of SCs is also higher than that of the OBCs minus the Kolis. The assertive dalit mobilization sparked by the Una incident has to be seen in this light. In Haryana, the percentage of graduates among the Jats, at 5.1 per cent, is not only lower than that of the Brahmins (15.7 per cent) and

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

Table 5.2 Caste groups

143

Education attained (by caste) in Maharashtra

Illiterate

Primary

12.6

43.8

Sec. and hr. secondary

Graduate and above

All

16.0

100

2004–5 Brahmin

27.1

Forward

23.5

48.1

19.4

8.3

100

Maratha

28.7

48.7

17.5

4.6

100

Kunbi

27.7

55.5

14.2

2.5

100

Mali

24.6

51.8

18.1

5.3

100

OBCs

28.3

51.8

16.4

3.5

100

SCs

34.1

50.2

13.5

1.9

100

STs

47.3

43.3

8.2

1.2

100

All

29.9

49.7

15.9

4.1

100

2011–12 Brahmin

4.8

30.9

38.3

26.1

100

Forward

9.1

47.8

32.2

11.0

100

Maratha

16.3

45.4

30.3

8.1

100

Kunbi

13.4

60.8

22.0

3.8

100

Mali

11.0

52.4

27.1

9.5

100

OBCs

15.2

49.6

27.5

7.6

100

SCs

21.5

50.5

22.9

5.1

100

STs

33.9

50.1

13.9

2.1

100

All

16.8

49.1

26.7

7.4

100

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

other forward castes (14.4 per cent), but also of the OBCs (5.4 per cent). The SCs and OBCs have gained in education more than the Jats during 2004–5 to 2011–12. The percentage of graduates among Dalits has more than doubled from 0.8 per cent in 2004–5 to 2.1 per cent in 2011–12. The gain made by the OBCs is higher than that of Jats both in the level and rate of change in education (see Table 5.4). The Jats pay the price for their historical neglect of education, even more than other dominant castes.

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Table 5.3 Caste groups

Education completed (by caste) in Gujarat Graduate and above

All

21.3

17.0

100

46.3

22.6

5.9

100

50.7

22.6

8.0

100

Illiterate

Primary

Brahmin

14.5

46.8

Forward

25.0

Patels

18.4

Sec. and hr. secondary 2004–5

Kolis

38.0

52.1

9.2

0.6

100

OBC

37.9

53.6

7.0

1.1

100

SCs

33.7

54.2

9.2

2.7

100

STs

54.7

38.7

5.5

0.9

100

All Gujarat

35.3

49.7

11.6

3.2

100

Brahmin

7.3

43.8

29.8

19.1

100

Forward

13.5

49.7

25.1

11.7

100

9.8

47.6

32.8

9.8

100

2011–12

Patels Kolis

24.3

58.7

15.9

1.2

100

OBC

26.9

56.0

14.7

2.4

100

SCs

22.4

57.1

15.7

4.8

100

STs

37.7

50.3

10.8

1.2

100

All Gujarat

22.9

53.3

18.4

5.4

100

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

Change in Educational Status While Marathas, Patels, and Jats remain head and shoulders above the SCs and even the OBCs in terms of education, the latter are catching up. Dalits and OBCs have gained much, not just in the level but also in the rate of change in education in the last decade. During 2004–5 to 2011–12, the percentage of graduates among the SCs has doubled, as an average, in all three states—by 168 per cent in Maharashtra, 77 per cent in Gujarat, and 153 per cent in Haryana (see Figure 5.4). The OBCs also have made progress. The OBCs have more than doubled their graduates as an average with a rate of increase of 117 per cent in Maharashtra, 118 per cent

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145

Table 5.4 Education attained (by caste) in Haryana Caste groups Illiterate

Primary

23.4

41.8

Sec. and hr. secondary

Graduate and above

All

11.6

100

2004–5 Brahmin

22.8

Forward

28.1

40.9

21.7

9.2

100

Jats

37.5

42.8

16.5

2.9

100

OBC

43.5

38.6

14.6

3.1

100

SCs

47.8

42.0

8.9

0.8

100

All Haryana

40.3

40.7

14.7

3.9

100

Brahmin

16.3

33.4

34.5

15.7

100

2011–12 Forward

17.5

37.8

30.3

14.4

100

Jats

25.6

40.2

29.1

5.1

100

OBC

28.3

43.8

22.5

5.4

100

SCs

32.1

48.1

17.7

2.1

100

All Haryana

26.4

42.6

24.3

6.7

100

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

in Gujarat, and 76 per cent in Haryana. In contrast, the rates of increase were only 76 per cent for the Marathas in Maharashtra, 22 per cent for the Patels in Gujarat, and 74 per cent for the Jats in Haryana. As a result, these dominant castes felt threatened: they feared that their grip over economy and society was loosening. All the more so as they could not get jobs in spite of investing a lot in education, whereas SCs and OBCs benefited from reservations in the public sector. This is most applicable to the Patels, some of them—among the poorest—being forced to sell or mortgage their land and properties to send their children to private educational institutions, yet unsure of getting decent jobs (Bhatt 2015). The Jobs The modern services-led current economic growth in India demands a certain level of education, social skills, and attributes. The dominant

Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan A. Maharashtra

Gujarat

Haryana

171.8 135.6

121.0

114.3 94.4

77.3 69.9

71.1

OB Cs Ja ts

Pa te ls

SC s

SC s

38.3

38.1

OB Cs

200.0 180.0 160.0 140.0 120.0 100.0 80.0 60.0 40.0 20.0 0.0

SC s OB C M s ar Ku at nb ha i-M s ar at ha s

Percentage increase of graduates

146

Change in the number of graduates among caste groups from 2004–5 to 2011–12

Figure 5.4

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

Percenatge of households

35 30

Maharashtra 30.5

Gujarat

27.6

25

Haryana

26.8 23.3 19.4

20

20.7 16.6

19.3

15

11.4

9.9

10 5

Figure 5.5

Ja ts

Cs OB

s SC

Pa te ls OB Cs

s SC

s SC

Ku OB nb Cs i-M ar at ha s

M

ar at ha s

0

Percentage of salaried among caste groups

Source: IHDS (2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ DSDR/studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs? Maharashtra

Percentage of households

80 70 60

Gujarat

Haryana 67

62.7

50

147

43.9

40

40.5 31.1

30

28.5

26.5 19.6

20

10.6

10

6.3 SC s

OB Cs

Ja ts

SC s

OB Cs

Pa te ls

SC s

M

Ku nb i-M

ar at ha s ar at ha s OB Cs

0

Figure 5.6

Percentage of cultivators among caste groups

Source: IHDS (2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ DSDR/studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

castes often lack these assets, while the SCs and OBCs miss them too but partly make up for them thanks to reservations on the basis of increased gain education. The salaried jobs they get are occupations everyone dreams of in India today, because of the stability and the average income they offer, compared to the informal sector and agriculture. For instance, the average annual per capita income in households headed by a cultivator is Rs 37,818 in Haryana while the salaried one gets, as an average, Rs 54,899, 68 per cent higher than the former. Any salaried job is placed over casual labour or petty self employment as a surer way of mobility. Now, the percentage of salaried people among the SCs is about 28 per cent in Maharashtra, about 27 per cent in Gujarat, and about 21 per cent in Haryana as against 30 per cent among the Marathas, 19 per cent among the Patels, and just 11 per cent among the Jats (see Figure 5.5). The OBCs are also doing rather well. Salaried among them are 23 per cent in Maharashtra, about 17 per cent in Gujarat, and 19 per cent in Haryana. The fact that the salaried among SCs is much higher has something to do with the reservation policy that they enjoy for a long time, while the OBCs benefit from it since the 1990s. This rise of SCs and OBCs in salaried jobs has generated resentment among many dominant castes.

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These dominant castes are still disproportionally high in cultivation when the cultivation is becoming increasing unviable and yield less return than other occupations in rural area. For instance, about 63 per cent Kunbi Marathas and 44 per cent Marathas in Maharashtra, 40 per cent Patels in Gujarat and 67 per cent Jats in Haryana are in cultivation (see Figure 5.6). The corresponding figures for OBCs for these states are respectively 31 per cent, 28 per cent and 26 per cent. The percentage of cultivators among SCs is even lower as they hardly own land. They are about 11 per cent in Maharashtra, about 20 per cent in Gujarat and 6 per cent in Haryana. Cultivators are opting out in India, even some of them turning into agricultural labourers as the return to cultivation is lower than that of the former. A columnist citing P. Sainath, pointed out: ‘As a result of farmers losing their status as main cultivators, dropping out of agriculture and becoming landless farm labourers, the country was experiencing the “biggest human displacement in history”’ (Singh 2013). As the pathways of mobility for the lower castes are education and jobs, particularly through quotas, they have seen relative improvement and made it to the salaried class, and this development has generated an unsettling effect among the dominant castes.18 But these castes should not be seen as blocks given the socio-economic differentiation that they are experiencing along class lines.

Within the Dominant Castes, Some Are More Equal than Others While the last decade has seen class differentiation across caste groups in India, this differentiation has been sharper among dominant castes. The graphical representation of inequality in per capita income is illustrated by the relative Lorenz curves of each caste group in Figures 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9. The Lorenz curve for SCs is very close to the 45-degree line while the curve for the dominant castes is far away from the central line. For other caste groups, the curves are placed between these two extremes. The Lorenz curve for the Marathas is placed slightly above the OBCs but below the Kunbi-Marathas. Marathas are a case in point. The elite Marathas are extremely doing well while a large fraction of them are lagging behind. The highest quintile (20 per cent of the caste group) gets 48 per cent of the total income of the Marathas with a mean per capita income of Rs 86,750 (see the appendix Table 5A.1).

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

149

Cumulative income share

1 .8

STs

SCs

Brahmins

.6 45*

.4

Marathas

.2

Kunbi Marathas OBCs

0 0

20

Figure 5.7

40 60 Cumulative population share

80

100

Relative Lorenz curves for per capita income of caste groups of Maharashtra

Source: IHDS (2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ DSDR/studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

Cumulative income share

1 Brahmins

.8 OBCs

.6

STs

SCs

.4 45*

Patels

.2

Forward castes

0 0

Figure 5.8

20

40 60 Cumulative population share

80

100

Relative Lorenz curves for per capita income of caste groups of Gujarat

Source: IHDS (2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ DSDR/studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

150

Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan A. 1

Cumulative income share

OBCs .8 .6 .4 45*

Jats

SCs

.2

Forward Brahmins

0 0

Figure 5.9

20

40 60 Cumulative population share

80

100

Relative Lorenz curves for per capita income of caste groups of Haryana

Source: IHDS (2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ DSDR/studies/36151. Last Accessed on 14 March 2020.

The lowest quintile of the Marathas earns ten times less (Rs 7,198) and the quintile just above, only Rs 16,285. Which means that the 40 percent poorest get less than 13 percent of the total income of the caste—and are lagging behind the Scheduled Castes elite. In fact, the mean incomes of the highest Dalit quintile, Rs 63,030, and that of the second highest, Rs 28,897, are above those of the three lowest quintiles of the Marathas. Given the fact that 44 per cent of the Marathas are still in cultivation, this trend only reflects the rural character of the Marathas in the context of an increasingly pronounced rural/ urban divide in Maharashtra. The SCs and OBCs could find alternative sources of income thanks to reservations, not the poor Marathas. As in the case of the Marathas, the Patels are also more divided on class lines than any other caste group in Gujarat. The graphical Lorenz curve (see Figure 5.8) starkly reveals how far away the curve from the central line. The gain made in their relative position in annual per capita income from the second in 2004–5 to the top in 2011–12 (by displacing the Brahmins who were number ones in 2004–5) did not percolate to the lower rung of Patels, particularly those 40 per cent who still till the land. This gets reflected in the rise of

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

151

inequality among the Patels. The Gini coefficient of the Patels is one of the highest in the state, and has jumped from 0.49 in 2004–5 to 0.57 in 2011–12. Even the Gini coefficient evolved much less among the Brahmins (from 0.49 to 0.54), while it has even declined among the other forward castes. Therefore, it is no surprise to learn that the 20 per cent of the richest among the Patels cornered 61.4 per cent of the total Patels’ income in 2011–12 (against 52.8 per cent in 2004–5), whereas the 20 per cent of the poorest got only 2.8 per cent (against 4.1 per cent seven years before). But the poor Patels are probably even more upset because of another development: they are increasingly lagging behind the OBCs and Dalits. In fact, the mean income of the first quintile of the Patels, Rs 3,382, used to be very similar to the mean income of the second quintile of the SCs, Rs 3,643, in 2004–5 (see the appendix Table 5A.2). Seven years later, the mean income of the first quintile of the Patels, Rs 6,978, was almost half the mean income of the second quintile of the SCs, Rs 11,411. A similar trend is seen in the following quintile. And the fourth quintile of the SCs now earned in 2011–2 as much as the third quintile of the Patels, about Rs 29,000. What is important here is the trend towards the closing of a secular gap, even more obvious in the comparison between Patels and OBCs. The first three quintiles of the Patels have seen a mean income increase of respectively 106 per cent, 137 per cent, and 144 per cent from 2004–5 and 2011–12, whereas the first four quintiles of the Kolis have increased by 74 per cent, 128 percent, 192 per cent, and 204 per cent and the first four quintiles of the other OBCs have increased respectively by 211 per cent, 177 per cent, 170 per cent, and 194 per cent. As a result, the third quintiles of the Kolis and of the other OBCs earn almost as much as the second quintile of the Patels and their fourth quintiles almost as much as the Patels’ third quintile. As in Gujarat, Maharashtra also has seen the decline of a gap between dominant caste and SCs and OBCs; the decline is even more visible between the Malis, an OBC caste and Marathas. The last three quintiles of Marathas have seen income increase of respectively 195 per cent, 185 per cent, 129 per cent from 2004–5 to 2011–12, while the last three quintiles of Malis have increased by 217 per cent, 239 per cent, and 247 per cent (see the appendix Table 5A.1). As a result, the Malis who were earning 68 per cent of what Maratha earned in 2004–5 earn

152

Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan A.

now as much as of 86 per cent. The fourth and fifth quintiles of Malis’s income were respectively of 69 per cent and 61 per cent of the fourth and fifth quintiles in 2004–5 have increased to 82 per cent and 93 per cent respectively. Similarly, the fifth quintile of SCs were earning 66 per cent of the same quintile of Maratha earned in 2004–5, has increased to 74 per cent. The trend indicates that elites of among Malis and SCs are even catching up with the elites of Marathas. Inequalities have also increased among the Jats more than in most other caste groups in Haryana. The Lorenz curve for the Jats is very far away from the 45-degree (see Figure 5.9), while it is very close to the 45-degree line for the SCs and OBCs. The Gini coefficient, between 2004–5 to 2011–12, has gone up from 0.40 to 0.56 while the evolution among the SCs and OBCs has been less dramatic. The coefficient has gone up for the OBCs from 0.47 to 0.48 and for the SCs, it has marginally moved up from 0.38 to 0.39. The rise of the Gini coefficient among the Jats has to do with the elite cornering most of total income of the group (see the appendix Table 5A.3). The richest quintile among the Jats has cornered about 60 per cent of total income while the bottom quintile has just 4 per cent of total income.The top quintile within the OBCs has 59 per cent of its total income while the bottom quintile has about 3 per cent of total income. As in the OBCs, the SCs too have lowest intra-caste disparity as compared to other caste groups in the state. The top quintile within the SCs has about 49 per cent of total income while the bottom quintile has about 5 per cent income. The last decade has seen sharp class differentiation among Jats. The first three quintiles (bottom) of the Jats have seen a mean income increase of respectively 192 per cent, 137 per cent, and 144 per cent from 2004–5 to 2011–12 while the fourth improved by 189 per cent and the fifth by 396 per cent (see the appendix Table 4A.3). This trend only confirms the fact that the richest quintile among the Jats cornered 60 per cent of the total Jats’ income in 2011–12 as against 46.9 per cent in 2004–5 whereas the 20 per cent of the poorest got only 3.3 per cent (against 3.1 per cent seven years before). The fourth and third quintiles of Jats have lost to the richest among them.19 What is the most unsettling for the Jats is the fact that the average of income of the fourth and fifth quintiles of SCs and OBCs are higher than that of average income of the first three quintiles of Jats. The average income of the first three

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

153

quintiles of Jats is Rs 22,648 while the fourth and fifth quintiles of SCs are Rs 24,170 and Rs 46,109. *** How different is rural India, compared to the time of In Pursuit of Lakshmi? The ‘bullock capitalists’ are still there and they continue to protest, but their demands are not taken very seriously by the mainstream parties—especially by the BJP—because of their dependence upon an urban base that has grown with the rise of the industry and the services since the 1991 reforms. Secondly, the rural ‘sector’ has experienced a new form of differentiation along caste lines in the wake of positive discrimination schemes benefitting the Dalits and, after Mandal, the OBCs. These groups have started to catch up precisely at a time when urbanization made the ruling parties less responsive to kisans’ demands. The dominant castes which formed the bulk of these kisans (or ‘bullock capitalists’) did not only resent the socio-economic rise of OBCs and Dalits, but also the implementation of laws such as the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) (in U.P. after 2007) or other parties. The slew of welfare measures such as MGNREGA introduced in rural India since 2005 had adverse impact on the cultivating castes. The SCs and OBCs are often the main beneficiaries of MGNREGA than that of dominant castes in rural India. Their frustrations were fostered by another factor: while they aspired to become parts and parcels of what Narendra Modi called the ‘neomiddle class’, a social category made of those who had migrated to the city hoping for a brighter future, they were not given any good job. If India’s version of jobless growth is affecting every group, it is taken particularly badly by dominant castes members who used to enjoy a certain status in their villages and who cannot make both ends meet in cities’ suburbs. The main point we have made above, however, pertains to the heterogeneity of the dominant castes. What we have said so far in this conclusion is only relevant for sections of these groups which do not form blocks, contrary to the common impression. While sociologists tend to dismiss the dominant castes’ demand for reservations by considering their socio-economic conditions vis-à-vis OBCs and Dalits

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Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan A.

as an average, these dominant castes need to be disaggregated from this very socio-economic point of view. These are large groups which have experienced a significant differentiation in the recent years, as evident from the Gini coefficients mentioned above. If some of them have benefited from the double digit growth rate of the 2000s, others, mostly those who have stayed behind in the village, have not gained much and, therefore, have been doubled by OBCs and Dalits. Now, will this differentiation of the dominant castes along class lines result in the weakening of caste solidarity? It may not. As the Rudolphs argued in Determinants and Varieties of Agrarian Mobilization that affinal, kinship, and lineage solitaries are stronger for dominant castes particularly of cultivating and herding castes, and hence these castes possess the necessary means for internal cooperation. This argument has salience even now perhaps because the concerns of rural India transcend castes and demands transcaste coalitions. We have seen such a coalitions—poor Patels, OBCs, and Dalits coming together in the case of Gujarat. However, the extent and continuity of such class coalitions may be limited and will not go very far. For instance, in Gujarat, it seems that the rich Patels who have profited by the recent economic growth have shifted from the BJP to the Congress, such as the young Patels asking for reservations, not necessarily because they wanted to benefit from positive discrimination schemes but out of a sense of caste identity and solidarity. Many of them wanted to punish the BJP government for the repression of the Patel demonstrators in 2015, in particular.

Endnotes 1. The Rudolphs argued that ‘Bullock capitalists are advantageously placed by their objective circumstances to become the hegemonic agrarian class’ (‘Determinants and Varieties of Agrarian Mobilization’, in Meghna Desai, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, and Ashok Rudra (eds), Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984, 319). They identify seven objective determinants for agrarian mobilization in India: technology; historical conjunctures; ecological circumstances; agrarian structures and relationships (distribution and nature of rights in land); government policy as inputs; caste and community bonds; and family and affinal relations.

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155

2. By contrast, the Rudolphs distinguished four classes in rural India: ‘agricultural laborers, small-holders, bullock-capitalists, and large landowners’. 3. This is what the Rudolphs call ‘the polarization thesis’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 334). 4. On the BKU, see Dipankar Gupta (1997). 5. The concept of dominant caste, introduced by M.N. Srinivas, designates an upper caste or an intermediate caste or the Shudra order which controls a large area of land and is numerous locally or regionally. (M.N. Srinivas 1995 [1966], 10). 6. Caste is the subject of the first part of the book the Rudolphs published 20 years before: In Pursuit of Lakshmi (1987), The Modernity of Tradition (1967). 7. While one million job seekers are joining the labour market every month, the 2015 Economic Survey of India acknowledged that the Indian youth are not easily employable because of their lack of education (Economic Survey of India 2015: vol. 1, p. 11; vol. 2, p. 133). 8. On the malleability of the Jats’ identity, see C. Jaffrelot (2002, 405–22). 9. In 2014, ‘barring five states, all others have received significantly lower funds from the centre under the scheme’ known as MGNREGA (‘No Acche Din for Rural India Under the Modi Government, Data Indicates’, Scroll.in, 8 January 2015, available at https://scroll.in/article/699088/no-acche-din-for-rural-indiaunder-the-modi-government-data-indicates, last accessed on 6 February 2020). 10. The basic demand of the BKS was to get the eight hours of electricity that farmers were receiving not during the night or, sometimes, in the afternoon, but only in the morning. 11. ‘Gujarat Farmers to Intensify Their Stir if SIR Is Not Scrapped’, Tehelka, 13 August 2013. See http://www.tehelka.com/gujarat-farmers-to-intensify-theirstir-if-sir-is-not-scrapped/ (last accessed on 21 November 2013) and ‘Gujarat Farmers Protest against Land Acquisition for Maruti Plant’, Business Line, 18 June 2013. See http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/states/gujaratfarmers-protest-against-land-acquisition-for-maruti-plant/article4827095.ece (last accessed on 21 November 2013). To review the land policy of the Modi government in Gujarat would take us too far. The reader interested in this facet of the pro-industry bias of the BJP may read C. Jaffrelot, ‘Business-Friendly Gujarat in 2000s: The Implications of a New Political Economy’, in Christophe Jaffrelot, Atul Kohli, and Kanta Murali (eds), Business and Politics in India, New York, OUP, forthcoming. 12. For more detail, see C. Jaffrelot (2015, 820–38). 13. In March 2017, Tamil Nadu farmers not only demonstrated in their state, but sent a delegation to Delhi and ‘held a 40-day protest at Jantar Mantar in dramatic fashion—eating dead rats, stripping, sitting with the skulls of deceased farmers’ (Mridula Chari, ‘Explained: Behind the Farmer Protests in 16 States Are Bumper Harvests and Low Prices’, Scroll.in, 18 June 2017, available at https://

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scroll.in/article/840896/explained-behind-the-farmer-protests-in-16-states-arebumper-harvests-and-low-prices, last accessed on 6 February 2020). 14. ‘Madhya Pradesh Police Firing Fallout: Punjab Farmers Join Hands for State-Wide Protests on June 12’ (The Hindustan Times, 9 June 2017). It was decided that two memoranda would be sent by the peasant organizations, one to the prime minister demanding that murder cases be registered against all the police personnel involved in the Mandsaur firing, and another to Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, demanding the loan waiver (Chaba 2017). 15. On the case of Gujarat, see C. Jaffrelot (2016a). 16. The Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) was done by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in collaboration with the University of Maryland. This paper uses the both rounds, that is, the IHDS I done in 2004–5 and IHDS II done in 2011–12. It is a nationally representative, multi-topic survey of 42,152 households done in 1,503 villages and 971 urban neighbourhoods across India. IHDS-II re-interviewed about 83 per cent of the IHDS-I households plus any split households that resided in the same community. 17. The sample is identical for 2004–5. However, a small percentage of households which got split (for example, a family becoming into two after marriage, fragmented for other reasons) in 2011–12 are not available for 2004–5. Yet, the parental households are retained. The actual samples available for Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Haryana in 2004–5 respectively are 2,849, 1,564, and 1,415. 18. The report documents that rise of Dalits in education and business and the resultant ‘homogenization in life style and appearance’ generated anxiety among the Jats and led to violence against Dalits in pockets of Haryana (Subodh 2015). 19. The SCs and OBCs have also seen the class differentiation, but not to the level of Jats. The first three quintiles (bottom) of the SCs have witnessed increase of respectively 176 per cent, 174 per cent, and 153 per cent from 2004–5 to 2011–12, while the corresponding figures for OBCs are 211 per cent, 171 per cent, and 156 per cent respectively. The fourth and fifth quintiles among SCs have seen rise of respective income by 185 per cent and 175 per cent, while the same quintiles among OBCs have seen of 170 per cent and 177 per cent.

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Appendix Table 5A.1 Income quintiles

Brahmin Income share 2004–5

Q1

Income distribution by quintiles across caste groups in Maharashtra

3.3

2011–12 5.2

Mean income

Gini

2004-5

2011–12

2004–5

3,432

12,613

0.28

2011–12 0.22

Q2

8.8

11.8

10,486

26,484

0.12

0.08

Q3

13.9

18.2

15,741

41,687

0.04

0.05

Q4

25.6

24.3

25,748

55,847

0.09

0.06

Q5

48.5

40.4

65,521

1,00,361

0.31

0.13

All

100.0

100.0

19,492

44,638

0.51

0.36

Income quintiles

Forward Income share 2004–5

Q1

4.2

2011–12 4.3

Mean income 2004–5

2011–12

3,588

7,886

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

0.22

0.21

Q2

9.5

8.9

8,087

17,057

0.08

0.10

Q3

15.0

15.0

12,795

27,490

0.06

0.07

Q4

22.8

24.3

19,528

44,473

0.07

0.08

Q5

48.6

47.5

42,095

88,839

0.19

0.22

All

100.0

100.0

15,344

35,264

0.43

0.45

Income quintiles

Marathas Income share 2004–5

2011–12

Mean income 2004–5

2011–12

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

Q1

3.4

3.6

2,720

7,523

0.21

0.25

Q2

7.9

9.1

5,822

17,408

0.10

0.09

Q3

13.0

15.2

9,703

28,640

0.08

0.08

Q4

22.0

24.3

16,285

46,414

0.10

0.08

Q5

53.7

47.8

39,865

91,109

0.28

0.22

All

100.00

100.0

13,933

37,255

0.48

0.44

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

163

Table 5A.1 (Cont’d) Income quintiles

Kunbi Marathas Income share 2004–5

Q1

3.2

2011–12

Mean income

Gini

2004–5

2011–12

3.8

1,621

4,899

2004–5 0.29

2011–12 0.19

Q2

7.9

7.8

3,751

8,648

0.08

0.05

Q3

12.2

11.4

5,717

12,685

0.07

0.07

Q4

18.4

18.2

8,710

20,540

0.10

0.10

Q5

58.3

58.8

27,582

66,164

0.26

0.33

All

100.0

100.0

9,529

25,156

0.51

0.53

Income quintiles

Malis Income share 2004–5

2011–12

Mean income

Gini

2004–5

2011–12

2004–5

2011–12

Q1

4.5

3.5

2,614

6,500

0.17

0.21

Q2

10.0

8.1

4,704

13,470

0.06

0.10

Q3

13.8

12.8

6,695

21,205

0.09

0.08

Q4

22.6

23.6

11,277

38,242

0.08

0.09

Q5

49.0

51.9

24,389

84,957

0.23

0.17

All

100.0

100.0

9,491

32,204

0.43

0.46

Income quintiles

OBCs Income share 2004–5

2011–12

Mean income 2004–5

2011–12

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

Q1

4.0

3.3

2,434

4,888

0.19

0.28

Q2

7.9

7.9

4,710

11,261

0.08

0.08

Q3

12.3

13.6

7,312

19,649

0.07

0.10

Q4

20.8

22.4

12,418

32,066

0.10

0.08

Q5

54.9

52.8

32,751

76,441

0.29

0.24

All

100.00

100.0

10,674

28,581

0.49

0.48 (Cont’d)

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Table 5A.1 Income quintiles

(Cont’d) SCs

Income share 2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12 2004–5

2011–12

Q1

4.9

4.9

2,582

6,864

0.17

0.16

Q2

8.6

9.2

4,415

12,632

0.07

0.08

Q3

13.3

13.6

6,876

19,165

0.08

0.07

Q4

22.3

23.7

11,401

32,770

0.10

0.09

Q5

50.9

48.6

26,483

67,523

0.24

0.20

All

100.0

100.0

9,445

26,172

0.46

0.44

Income quintiles

STs Income share 2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12 2004–5

2011–12

Q1

4.2

4.6

1,504

4,657

0.19

0.28

Q2

8.7

10.1

2,863

9,465

0.08

0.06

Q3

13.5

14.6

4,556

13,604

0.06

0.06

Q4

21.1

22.9

7,082

21,718

0.08

0.08

Q5

52.5

47.9

17,532

45,601

0.23

0.18

All

100.0

100.0

5,979

17,502

0.48

0.43

Income quintiles

Maharashtra Income share 2004–5

Q1

3.6

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12 2004–5

3.7

2,352

6,006

0.21

2011–12 0.23

Q2

7.7

8.1

4,756

12,529

0.08

0.09

Q3

12.5

13.7

7,789

21,152

0.08

0.08

Q4

21.8

23.8

13,470

36,185

0.10

0.10

Q5

54.3

50.7

33,893

79,425

0.27

0.22

All

100.0

100.0

11,504

30,525

0.49

0.47

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

Table 5A.2 Income quintiles

165

Income distribution by quintiles across caste groups in Gujarat Brahmin Income share

2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12

2004–5

2011–12

Q1

3.3

3.1

3,339

6,509

0.27

0.33

Q2

9.1

6.9

9,339

15,726

0.11

0.04

Q3

13.5

11.2

13,930

25,477

0.05

0.09

Q4

21.5

21.1

21,423

45,946

0.06

0.08

Q5

52.6

57.6

56,349

1,29,784

0.32

0.30

All

100.0

100.0

20,528

44,144

0.49

0.54

Income quintiles

Forward Income share 2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12

2004–5

2011–12

Q1

2.1

2.3

1,506

4,774

0.04

0.25

Q2

4.6

6.2

3,341

12,734

0.13

0.10

Q3

9.5

11.7

6,845

22,668

0.11

0.12

Q4

18.7

19.4

13,557

41,511

0.13

0.12

Q5

65.2

60.4

49,419

1,29,300

0.34

0.34

All

100.0

100.0

14,653

40,385

0.62

0.58

Income quintiles

Income share

Patels 2004–5

Q1

4.1

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5 2.8

3,382

Gini

2011–12

2004–5

6,978

0.26

2011–12 0.23

Q2

7.4

6.6

6,947

16,499

0.09

0.12

Q3

15.0

12.0

12,237

29,899

0.08

0.06

Q4

20.6

17.2

19,372

45,861

0.10

0.10

Q5

52.8

61.4

47,320

1,58,656

0.25

0.37

All

100.00

100.0

17,470

51,045

0.49

0.57 (Cont’d)

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Table 5A.2 Income quintiles

(Cont’d) Kolis

Income share 2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12

2004–5

2011–12

Q1

4.4

2.0

1,774

3,089

0.22

0.30

Q2

8.7

5.1

3,523

8,033

0.07

0.10

Q3

10.8

9.9

4,985

14,591

0.08

0.09

Q4

19.5

15.2

8,174

24,845

0.09

0.12

Q5

56.5

67.8

24,072

1,05,304

0.35

0.46

All

100.0

100.0

8,422

30,981

0.51

0.64

Income quintiles

OBCs Income share 2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12

2004–5

2011–12

Q1

4.4

4.4

1,663

5,184

0.28

0.19

Q2

9.4

8.2

3,495

9,700

0.05

0.05

Q3

15.0

12.1

5,297

14,309

0.08

0.08

Q4

19.3

19.3

7,955

23,420

0.07

0.09

Q5

51.9

56.0

19,873

66,722

0.29

0.34

All

100.0

100.0

7,536

23,692

0.47

0.51

Income quintiles

Income share

SCs 2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12

2004–5

Q1

3.7

2.8

1,821

3,814

0.27

2011–12 0.31

Q2

7.4

8.6

3,643

11,411

0.07

0.11

Q3

11.1

13.1

5,535

18,279

0.08

0.07

Q4

19.8

21.1

9,916

29,131

0.08

0.09

Q5

58.1

54.4

29,059

74,971

0.39

0.26

All

100.00

100.0

9,964

27,348

0.54

0.50

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

Table 5A.2 Income quintiles

167

(Cont’d) STs

Income share 2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

2011–12

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

Q1

4.1

2.7

939

1,475

0.41

0.27

Q2

10.7

6.5

2,194

4,019

0.05

0.11

Q3

15.8

11.5

3,052

6,876

0.05

0.10

Q4

19.7

21.5

4,351

12,616

0.07

0.09

Q5

49.7

57.8

10,446

34,574

0.35

0.33

All

100.0

100.0

4,101

11,821

0.44

0.55

Income quintiles

Gujarat Income share 2004–5

Mean income

2011–12 2004–5

Gini

2011–12

2004–5

2011–12

Q1

3.1

2.5

1,530

3,709

0.26

0.27

Q2

6.8

6.3

3,344

9,408

0.07

0.09

Q3

10.7

10.6

5,265

15,777

0.08

0.08

Q4

18.6

18.1

9,217

27,701

0.11

0.10

Q5

60.8

62.5

30,025

93,934

0.36

0.39

All

100.0

100.0

9,853

29,890

0.56

0.59

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

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Table 5A.3 Income quintiles

Income distribution by quintiles across caste groups in Haryana Brahmin Income share

2004–5

2011–12

Mean income 2004-5

2011–12

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

Q1

4.1

2.9

3,552

8,606

0.25

0.30

Q2

10.1

6.7

8,119

19,958

0.08

0.07

Q3

15.0

10.6

12,536

32,725

0.07

0.08

Q4

23.1

17.8

18,824

54,238

0.08

0.11

Q5

47.7

62.0

40,942

1,88,266

0.19

0.42

All

100.0

100.0

15,072

60,509

0.41

0.58

Income quintiles

Forward Income share 2004–5

Q1

2011–12

Mean income 2004-5

2011–12

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

3.47

3.0

3,359

6,527

Q2

8.828

6.7

7,996

Q3

12.964

10.6

12,295

Q4

21.948

17.5

20,262

36,100

0.09

0.09

Q5

52.79

62.3

49,471

1,28,757

0.24

0.44

All

100

100.0

18,720

79,506

0.48

0.58

Income quintiles

0.20

0.26

13,883

0.11

0.08

21,818

0.06

0.07

Jats Income share 2004–5

Q1

3.1

Q2

2011–12

Mean income 2004-5

2011–12

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

3.3

3,710

10,839

0.27

0.28

9,010

22,242

0.09

0.06

10.8

7.1

Q3

16.4

10.9

14,151

34,530

0.06

0.08

Q4

22.7

19.3

19,965

57,845

0.07

0.10

Q5

46.9

59.4

40,370

2,00,391

0.21

0.44

All

100.0

100

18,163

63,679

0.40

0.56

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

Table 5A.3 Income quintiles

(Cont’d) OBCs

Income share 2004–5

Q1

169

2.7

2011–12

Mean income 2004-5

3.8

1,935

2011–12 6,027

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

0.35

0.25

Q2

8.7

8.6

4,864

13,181

0.09

0.07

Q3

14.1

13.1

7,849

20,063

0.06

0.06

Q4

21.7

21.2

12,069

32,638

0.08

0.09

Q5

52.7

53.4

29,708

82,333

0.27

0.30

All

100.0

100

11,627

31,027

0.47

0.48

Income quintiles

Income share

SCs 2004–5

2011–12

Mean income 2004-5

2011–12

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

Q1

5.4

5.566

2,103

5,814

0.19

0.26

Q2

10.7

10.639

3,968

10,891

0.07

0.06

Q3

17.0

15.425

6,203

15,698

0.07

0.05

Q4

23.3

23.506

8,751

24,170

0.06

0.07

Q5

43.7

44.864

16,208

46,109

0.19

0.21

All

100.0

100

7,489

20,566

0.38

0.39

Income quintiles

All of Haryana Income share 2004–5

2011–12

Mean income 2004-5

2011–12

Gini 2004–5

2011–12

Q1

3.371

3.013

2,349

6,526.5

0.25

0.26

Q2

8.544

6.686

5,238

13,882.61

0.10

0.08

Q3

0.07

0.07

13.988

10.554

8,498

21,817.98

Q4

21.739

17.477

13,218

36,100.03

0.08

0.09

Q5

52.358

6.227

31,830

1,28,757

0.26

0.44

All

100

100

12,483

41,704

0.47

0.58

Source: IHDS (2004–5 and 2011–12). Available at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/DSDR/studies/22626 and https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/DSDR/ studies/36151. Last accessed on 14 March 2020.

6

Does Class Matter in Politics? Rethinking ‘Conditions and Reasons’

rina agarwala and ronald herring

B

etter known for their interpretive work, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph also pioneered a macro political economy with Indian sensibilities. They did this through the analysis of the transformative power of a developmental state in New Delhi, and its political limitations under democratic conditions. Dialectically, their insistence on ‘situated knowledge’ provided a road map for investigating the conditions under which centralized state power for societal transformation is mediated by the complex dynamics of caste, class, and community as translated into politics. Of these, class received the least attention. Their scepticism about class analysis is widespread among Indologists and prompts us to ask new questions about a long-standing puzzle: Does class matter in politics? The Rudolphs’ investigations into political power and economic consequences began with Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity (Desai, Rudolph, and Rudra 1984) and continued on a larger scale with In Pursuit of Lakshmi (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). In their later articles, they deepened investigation of India’s state–society relations (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001; Rudolph and Rudolph 2002). We hope here to appreciate the Rudolphs’ contributions by looking both to inspirations and differences in approach, particularly with regard to state–class relations: the conditions under which classes become overt political actors and the effects of power on the failures of class transformation. Rina Agarwala and Ronald Herring, Does Class Matter in Politics? Rethinking ‘Conditions and Reasons’. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oso/9780190125011.003.0006

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Our focus by no means covers the whole of the Rudolphs’ scholarship, and certainly not the mentoring and professional contributions beyond written texts that so greatly enriched the field for all of us. Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph thought about class in a way quite different from our perspective. Marxian analysis of politics centres the messy translation of a class in itself—defined by position in an economic structure—to a class for itself—consciously active for class interests politically. Sceptical of deterministic strands in some Marxian approaches, the Rudolphs (1984) nevertheless centred this exact dynamic, focusing on the Indian state’s interaction with the translation from ‘objective criteria’ or structure to ‘subjective reasons’ or collective action and agency. We view this translation as the central problematic of class analytics: how, and to what extent, do classes in themselves become classes for themselves—or fail to do so? How, and to what extent, does the developmental state advance or retard this transition? We depart from the Rudolphs in conceptualizing class as a social relationship, rather than a status, and class identities as mutually determinative with, rather than mutually exclusive of, other social identities. In this piece, we analyse two under-researched class groups: selfemployed workers in the non-agrarian sector, and a class the Rudolphs invented: ‘bullock capitalists’ in the agrarian sector. Both groups occupy contradictory class positions—with access to some capital (be it land, bullocks/tractors, or a sewing machine), but also dependent on the value of their own labour. Increased access to capital is important to them, but returns to their labour—driven by market competition, terms of trade, or technology—largely determine their life chances. Often, they are unable to secure sufficient return on their capital or their own labour to escape poverty. Both groups’ conflicting interests offer potential for and obstacles to class consciousness. Both groups have launched collective action efforts that target India’s developmental state. Self-employed workers, who are swelling in number, have mobilized around their interests as ‘workers’ (not entrepreneurs), who have been left out of the post-reform state’s promise of prosperity from market-led growth. They have demanded from the state new economic policies and labour regulations that support, rather than punish, their livelihoods, thereby demanding that the state recognizes them as legitimate economic actors. Bullock capitalists,

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who are slipping from security in the agrarian system, organized around the interests of farmers suffering from sectoral discrimination: ‘urban bias’ in state policy. With globalization, it is less clear the state can fix the terms of trade for farmers. Moreover, national organizations of farmers have failed to form around collective interests such as price policy and technological advances. Both groups employ non-class identities such as caste, gender, ‘the poor’, citizens of India and Bharat to pursue these goals. We find confirmation in these cases that class interests are ever-present, class structures are ever-changing, and class identities are mutually determinative with ascriptive identities. Collective action efforts among less powerful groups are seldom victorious or transformative, and these groups are no exception. Nonetheless, their inchoate struggles do not mean that class interests and struggles are unimportant politically. We find that the primary engines in the Rudolphs’ seminal works continue to drive social change, but with far less state autonomy from class politics than they asserted. Self-employed workers and bullock capitalists have launched a ‘politics of recognition’ that aims to deepen India’s democracy by increasing the number of state beneficiaries. In turn, rather than serving as a marginalizer of class politics, as the Rudolphs argued, we find the Indian state continuously makes and re-makes class politics.

Poverty and the State: The Political Puzzle of Class On the failure of India to alleviate ‘insults to human dignity entailed in mass poverty’, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (1984, 287) wrote: The pervasiveness of poverty suggests that the poor have ample reasons to protest their condition and to mobilize to change it. … Apparently desperate objective conditions do not always translate into sufficient reasons to engage in political action aimed at rectifying the micro- or macro- causes of poverty.

But why have ‘desperate’ economic conditions in a vigorous democracy with a strong state egregiously persisted? As the majority at Independence was poor, with a strong state committed to their rehabilitation from the deprivations of colonial oppression, why did no effective war on poverty eventuate? Compared to equally poor societies in the 1950s, such as South Korea, Taiwan, or China, India remained

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173

what the Rudolphs call ‘rich-poor’: richer over time in the rich parts, less poor in many poor parts, but much more unequal throughout (Drèze and Sen 1996; Kohli 1987). To the Rudolphs, institutions and individual leaders mattered most. They usefully problematized the historic truth at the core of civic action: there is nothing automatic or inevitable about the translation from interests—for example, of the poor—to successful political action. Their explanation of the failure of India’s poor to mobilize ‘despite objective conditions’ builds from a sophisticated analysis of how local social structures (master–servant relations vs. horizontal bonds of caste and class) and forms of labour (hired vs. family) shape variable collective action outcomes. Ultimately, the primary mechanism through which objective conditions fail to translate into collective action, the Rudolphs argue, is leadership. Indian leaders have failed to translate the disadvantageous local conditions into ‘subjective reasons’ for collective action by subordinate groups (Rudolph and Rudolph 1984, 287). This emphasis on leadership is qualified by a recognition of rationality: poor people’s calculation of ‘risks and costs of action and the probabilities and consequences of success’ (Rudolphs 1984, 288). Clearly, the worker or sharecropper has much to lose in confronting her boss; quiescence is often the rational—and observed—strategy (Herring 1981). In inserting calculation within power dynamics, the Rudolphs appropriately centred the structure–agency problem, thereby complicating their culturalist perspective. But surely any answer to the question of how societies become or remain rich-poor also has to do with class structure, class consciousness, and class mobilization. Yet, the Rudolphs downplayed the utility of class theoretically. Their argument about the absence of class and class politics rests on three (in our view, flawed) assumptions: (1)  class is defined as a static wealth stratum, rather than a social relation; (2) class is mutually exclusive to caste, rather than mutually determinative; and (3) mobilization enabled by leadership is sufficient to alter conditions embedded in structural power relations. In their path-breaking work on development, In Pursuit of Lakshmi (1987, 23), the Rudolphs foregrounded the national state as a formidable force that ‘marginalized class politics’ in India. The Indian developmental state from 1947 to the late-1980s was conceptualized in terms neither Marxian in the European tradition (a class compromise)

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nor pluralist in the American tradition (an arena where interest groups compete for policy preferences). The Rudolphs’ state in this period was ‘a powerful “third actor” that diminished the significance of capital and labour, the two classic protagonists of class politics’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 13). It was a Weberian state, autonomous from the polar pulls of class politics. It was also a centrist state, not from strategic positioning between mobilized class forces, but from its autonomy, able to stand above the influence of capital and labour. Classes, in turn, were not conceptualized as drivers of state action but instead as clients of the state (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). The absence of mass mobilization among India’s poor was offered as empirical evidence for the absence of class politics in India. But a great puzzle remains: with a strong developmental state and well documented failures of collective action at the bottom of society, why is it up to the poor—notoriously short on resources and political clout—to ‘engage in political action aimed at rectifying the micro- or macro- causes of poverty’ (1984, 287)? Is this not what a developmental state is supposed to do? Is it possible that the ‘weak–strong state’ of the Rudolphs was Janus-faced: weak towards some, strong towards others? Could it be instead that the very failure or absence of one class’s politics indicates the success of another class’s politics? Might state policy reflect more success of the strong in defending their interests than the failure of the poor in pursuing theirs? Indeed, other scholars of India have highlighted the success of some classes in capturing state power. Writing in the same period, Pranab Bardhan (1984) conceptualized the Indian state as an uneasy alliance of three proprietary classes: (a) capitalists, (b) landlords, and (c) a thin professional class holding positions in the state itself. The third leg of Bardhan’s class triangle was based not on control of the means of physical production (capital, land) but on a monopoly of knowledge, skills, and position that enabled privilege. In other words, Saraswati was as important as Lakshmi. For Bardhan, relations among the three dominant classes were not of the antagonistic kind that yielded European welfare states, in which mobilized labour forced concessions from capital in durable social-democratic pacts. Rather, Bardhan’s nonantagonistic dominant classes traded surplus, power, and autonomy across issue areas (landlords controlled agrarian policy, industrialists controlled trade and infrastructure). The developmental state itself

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175

empowered the third leg of the triangle by expanding the scope of state authority. For this professional bureaucracy to be a class-for-itself presupposes its centrality in economic processes—a phenomenon carefully documented in Lakshmi. Aseema Sinha (2003) added a critical qualification: scale. She demonstrated that business’ class power was decisive in developmental outcomes at the sub-national level. Gujarati politicians, for example, did what capital needed, by pressuring the central state and interacting with the provincial state, resulting in strong economic growth. Politicians and bureaucrats extracted rents for their compliance with capital’s needs, but the state delivered. In Tamil Nadu, the provincial state likewise extracted rents but was inconsistent in delivering on promises, leading to erratic growth. In West Bengal, the state under Communist-party electoral hegemony did little to help the business community no matter the payoffs; growth rates were low because the help capital needed from the state was inaccessible. Working classes’ relations to the state also varied. In West Bengal, working-class power constrained state autonomy: Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI [M]) governments were obligated (by ideology and class base) to take an oppositional stance towards business. In Tamil Nadu, politicians had to appease mobilized masses through populist policies. In Gujarat there was no credible pro-labour political party to challenge the mutually beneficial alliance of capital and state. The theory of the developmental state prominent in explaining exceptional growth rates in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan was confirmed, but at the level of the provincial state, not in Delhi’s license-permit-quota raj. Two important conclusions follow from these works. First, class power need not be observable to exercise political clout. Class power mattered in West Bengal via highly visible forms on the streets and in the fields through labour and agrarian unions. In Gujarat, however, business class power mattered in interstices of the state few researchers can witness. This freedom of a dominant class to operate was abetted by the weakness of organized popular classes in opposition. Herein lies an important point: all power is relational and class power is no exception. Unlike with status markers, a relational conceptualization of class exposes the glaring truth that not everyone can move up the class hierarchy at once. We observe outcomes but do not see the pervasive structural power of capital, nor suitcases of

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money passed in hotel rooms in New Delhi. In contrast, the power of popular classes depends on ephemeral and rare developments of consciousness, collective action and mobilization—difficult to generate and sustain. As important, the mechanics of ordinary politics—often obscuring class interests—are themselves profoundly conditioned by class. For there to be patronage, or patron–client relations, there must be something patrons have and clients need—land, jobs, money, connections, status—which largely co-vary with class standing (Herring and Agarwala 2008). Second, lower-class politics need not be effective at every level or institution to shape lower-class life chances. When the Rudolphs assert that class politics is marginal in India, they are applying a very high and very European standard—representation on a national scale of politically mobilized classes through political parties espousing a class agenda. Few polities meet these criteria. Scaling up presents daunting obstacles, more so in India than in most polities. But as the Rudolphs themselves note, ‘Collective action rises in the first instance in local contexts’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1984, 303). Although lower-class power appeared impotent in India’s national politics for lack of organization and resources, it was thriving in the communist-led sub-national governments of Kerala and West Bengal, and the insurrections in the Maoist ‘red belt’ (Heller 1999; Mallick 1994). We lose much, then, by ignoring class politics because of the methodological difficulty of observation or failure to redirect the state on a large scale. Since the Rudolphs, the centrist Indian state has inched rightward, further inflating capitalists’ class power, while simultaneously expanding its welfare regime to retain democratic legitimacy among the less advantaged classes. To understand these shifts, we build on the Rudolphs’ contributions to understanding the state, as well as their important perspectives on understanding the successes and failures of translating objective conditions into collective action to further ask: How is the state (at the national and sub-national level) advancing or retarding contemporary efforts to form new classes for themselves? To answer the question, we conceptualize class as a social relationship, rather than a status, and class identities as mutually determinative with other social identities. Empirically, we focus on two understudied classes: self-employed labour in the non-agrarian sector and ‘bullock capitalists’ in the agrarian sector.

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Bullock Capitalists and Self-Employed Workers: Classes-in-Themselves A class-in-itself designates a position in a structure of production relations, independent of collective self-identification. The prime criterion for a class-in-itself is whether or not individuals are forced to sell labour power to reproduce themselves and their families or have sufficient capital to employ the labour power of others who lack capital (Wright 1997). These pure class positions are often blurred in social life, especially among those who occupy contradictory class positions. Bullock capitalists, for example, are the middle peasants of Maoist theory and practice (Wolf 1969): they are capitalists—often a middlesized farmer, paying wages and counting profit and loss at the margin— rather than Chayanovian peasants. As capitalists, they invest and sell in markets, employ workers, and lose from enhancement and enforcement of minimum wages—a project of Delhi and for long a demand of farmers’ organizations such as the Kisan Sabha—which itself has struggled politically over whether or not farm workers and farmers have antagonistic or compatible class interests. But medium-sized farmers are also labourers who self-exploit (themselves and their family members) as they work their own farms at subsistence wage rates. Whether or not such farmers engage in self-exploitation in addition to wage exploitation of others is a function of the profitability of the enterprise: net returns at the margin, modified by the terms of trade between what they sell and what they buy (Teitelbaum 2007). Self-employed workers, too, are small to medium-scale, independent producers who simultaneously serve as employer and employee. In India, self-employed workers represent the largest of the three subsets of the broad category of ‘informal’ labour (that is, those who are not legally protected or regulated under the standard employment relationship) in India,1 and they are the fastest-growing group of Indian workers today. They include small business owners with 0–2 employees (such as tea-stall owners and street vendors), service workers (such as domestic workers, trash collectors, and security guards), as well as individuals who sell products to buyers based on buyer specifications (as in garment manufacturing). Many self-employed workers are misclassified contract workers operating on orders from a so-called buyer/employer, because doing so absolves employers of any legal responsibility for

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their labourers. But the remaining mass are true to their name, owning some means of production—a small tea shop, a work shed, a fruit cart, or a sewing machine in their home. Like bullock capitalists, selfemployed workers rely on self-exploitation (of themselves and their family members) as well as hiring some labour. In scholarly and policy discussions, the category ‘informal labour’ often focuses only on non-agricultural workers (that is, those in manufacturing, construction, and services) who are unregulated and unprotected by labour laws. In recent years, the agricultural vs. nonagricultural delineation has made headlines in India. In 2011, India finally achieved a long sought developmental goal of having more workers in the non-agricultural sector (56.3 per cent) than in the agricultural sector (NSS 2012). The characteristics of non-agricultural work, however, have changed since the goal first emerged in the 1950s. Non-agricultural work now spans rural and urban regions, in contrast to 1951, when 71.9 per cent of rural people were cultivators and 28.1 per cent were (mostly landless) agricultural labourers (GoI 2014). Additionally, and contrary to some scholars’ depiction of informal labour as ‘rural’, ‘traditional’, and ‘outside capitalism’ (Sanyal 2007), the majority of India’s non-agricultural labour is informally employed. Of these non-agricultural, informal workers, self-employed workers comprise the largest sub-category at 48 per cent, because employers have been unable to absorb the millions of surplus labourers in India, even through unprotected, unregulated contract jobs. To make up for the employment shortfall and to address the survival needs of India’s poor, the Indian government has offered loans, skills training, and placement programmes to incentivize the poor to start their own small businesses. Although self-employment has not fulfilled the upwardmobility promises of the Indian state, it continues to be the only option for most Indian workers. These contradictory and continuously evolving class positions raise important questions as to if and how classes-in-themselves translate into classes-for-themselves—questions to which we now turn.

Self-Employed Workers and the State In their early work, the Rudolphs (1984) noted that the rural migrants who were increasingly turning to non-agrarian self-employment were

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diversifying agrarian interests and would ultimately undermine agrarian mobilization. Given the rapid growth of self-employment in recent decades, and the Indian state’s overt promotion of self-employment as a labour absorber, an important and unaddressed question is whether and how self-employed workers are organizing a new class-based identity of their own. A delicate balance between the interests of capital and labour is maintained by the Indian state’s recent promotion of self-employment. Self-employment dovetails with the currently dominant market logic of self-sufficiency. It re-defines capital, the employer, as capital, the buyer, thereby meeting capitalists’ interest in escaping costly labour obligations that reduce profitability and competitiveness, while still enabling capital to benefit from workers’ provision of the goods and services needed for production. At the same time, self-employment serves as one of the state’s solutions to ‘jobless growth’ offering (at least the promise of) an employment option for the masses not absorbed by India’s booming economy. To better understand this contemporary dynamic, we re-examine the role that capital and labour have always played in India’s developmental state. A key argument in Lakshmi is that the Indian state marginalized traditional class politics by replacing private capital as Indian labour’s main counter-player (in the non-agricultural sphere). Indeed, at the time of their writing, the Indian state employed the majority of the nation’s formally regulated, non-agricultural workers and was distinct from private employers. The Indian state depicted itself as a ‘model’ employer, thereby controlling the allocation of values in the employment relationship (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 20). The state had direct command of physical and financial capital, public authority, and force, thereby mediating potential class conflict. Finally, it enjoyed legitimacy as the bearer of representation and development for the working poor (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 23). The Rudolphs argued that these traits embedded workers and the state in a non-conflictual relationship and capital and the state in a non-dependent relationship (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 24). They correctly emphasized the Indian state’s unusually large role in industrial relations, even relative to the progressive states of Scandinavia. In doing so, they forced researchers to keep a spotlight on the state, even as most scholars decried the demise of the state under the auspices of ‘neoliberalism’ during the 1980s.

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But the Indian state’s strong and unique role in industrial relations was never autonomous from class forces (Herring and Agarwala 2008). Rather, class forces formed the Indian state. Indian capital, for example, was so successful in pressuring the Indian state to curb labour’s power that it reduced its reliance on the state to help control labour—which, in effect, undermined the Indian state’s structural power to discipline capital (Chibber 2003). Relatedly, the Rudolphs (1987, 27) argued the state undermined capital by pushing for small enterprises. But this interpretation fails to acknowledge that capital, too, had an interest in expanding small-scale enterprises, because such enterprises are exempt from protective labour laws. Organized industrial labour also helped shape the post-colonial state. First, labour demanded a large state role in the nation’s industrial relations. Although Indian industrial labour was weak relative to capital and the state in the post-Independence era, it had successfully organized since the early 1900s and had become a force that leaders of India’s burgeoning political democracy had to contend with. Therefore, the Indian state’s enormous role in industrial relations did not emerge only from the ability of the state to unilaterally assert its power over working classes. Rather, it reflected organized workers’ assumption that democratic pressures would force the state to hold employers (whether private or public) responsible for labour (Agarwala 2019a). Second, Indian labour successfully fought for state protection. At Independence, the Indian constitution enshrined a new social contract where, in return for citizens’ labour, the state would provide for labour’s social reproduction and economic betterment. The constitution stipulated that the state should be responsible for securing public assistance for its citizens in the case of ‘unemployment, old age, sickness, disablement and other cases of undeserved want’ (Papola and Pais 2007). Indian labour laws aimed to assist the state in fulfilling this promise by also holding capital responsible for labour’s needs. This protective framework continued to grow through the early 1980s as a result of labour’s organization. For example, the 1947 Industrial Disputes Act, arguably the most contested labour law today, protects workers against layoffs, retrenchment, and enterprise closures; it was amended in 1972, 1976, and 1982, with each amendment giving ever more protections to workers (Papola and Pais 2007). Throughout, policymakers expressed a deep commitment to expand protection to all Indian labourers (NCL 1969).

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Today, even in the face of the global onslaught against organized, formal labour, Indian unions remain active and have prevented the state from passing drastic labour reforms. That Indian labour unions have attempted to stall labour reforms is not surprising. That they have succeeded is surprising, and it is indicative of working-class power. India remains the only country in the world where every political party, at the national and state-level and across the political spectrum, must have an affiliated union federation to win an election. The largest union federation in India today, with 12 million members, is the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), affiliated to the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Some scholars even argue that political party affiliation is mutually beneficial for unions and parties in India (Teitelbaum 2011). In recent years, there has been a significant growth in independent unions and union federations, which supports the Rudolphs’ claim that political party affiliation, in fact, weakens labour movements. On one hand, the diversity of Indian unions’ membership, party affiliations, and structures indicate Indian labour’s fragmentation, a trend the Rudolphs decried and enigmatically termed ‘involuted pluralism’. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that Indian unions have also joined forces in unified collective action. For example, all central trade unions organized a nation-wide strike on 2 September 2015 and successfully stalled the government’s proposed Labour Code on Industrial Relations, which offered several anti-union amendments to existing legislation (Bhowmik 2015). In 2017, public sector bank employees launched a nation-wide strike at the height of the tumultuous demonetization moment to oppose labour reforms and outsourcing. In 2019, a nation-wide joint strike was once again implemented. This history generates a puzzle: if class actors were implicit in forming India’s strong developmental state during the 1950s–1970s, how has the state managed these non-state actors in the post-1980s era, when the state’s control over resources, its importance as an employer, and its legitimate authority as the nation’s sole developer are dwindling? To understand the continuing strength of the Indian state since Lakshmi, we must expose exactly how the Indian state at the national level has inched right-ward alongside capital, constricting working-class struggle on one hand but offering welfare rights to retain democratic legitimacy with its organized mass vote-base of workers on the other hand.

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Rather than reforming Indian labour laws, the Indian state has retained its democratic legitimacy while meeting the needs of an everexpanding group of private employers by maintaining labour laws in print but neutering them in practice and shifting the locus of the capital–labour battle outside the state’s own twentieth century legislative framework (Agarwala 2019b). Some may argue this move exposes the hollowness of labour’s victories; what use are labour laws if they are never enforced? Our interviews indicate that union leaders and members view the retention of labour laws, even when implementation is thin, as an important victory that secures official recognition of their exploitative employment relationship and (at the very least) the threat of power. Exactly how has the Indian state made this deft shift? First, the state has used its powerful role in labour relations to channel the public debates on labour reform towards a single issue—the need for labour flexibility. By never overtly attacking labour’s wages or other benefits, the state has sustained its legitimacy as a protector of workers. At the same time, the state has quietly undermined the power of all existing labour laws (protecting job security, wages, and non-wage benefits) by enabling state-level exceptions and reducing the resources of Labour Ministries designed to enforce national protective labour laws. These liberalizing moves have been justified as correcting the bureaucratic excesses critiqued as the ‘Inspector Raj’ system. More significantly, these moves directly appease the demands that capital has long been making. Second, the Indian state has capitalized on the Indian labour movement’s lack of reach to create and promote a new political actor—informal labour—that can provide capital with a legitimate alternative to formal labour. Informal workers have long been excluded from the protective reach of Indian labour law, policy, and organization, while simultaneously residing within the state’s punitive arm through regulations that criminalize them and their livelihoods and deny their businesses access to public spaces. These actions have built decades of informal workers’ resentment towards formal workers. At Independence, Indian labour laws (with two exceptions) applied only to big businesses. One exception is the Minimum Wage Law. But as the Rudolphs accurately pointed out, this law (which is rarely updated or enforced) merely created a new caste system with its plethora of strata (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 263). In effect,

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informal workers remained completely unprotected, even in the era of so-called state protection. Why were small businesses excluded from Indian labour law? In their attempt to control big business, Indian formal workers and the Indian state joined forces to enact legislations that excluded the smallscale sector, because it was often run by the self-employed family and kinship members of the working class who were viewed as unable to afford labour regulations. The state and organized labour, therefore, agreed to focus on the modern, big business future, where the smallscale sector would presumably be eradicated. In doing so, however, formal workers and the state excluded all ‘informal workers’ from protection, thereby giving capital a ready source of unprotected workers and thus a direct incentive to reproduce the small-scale sector (even in a modern context). Self-employed workers remained conflicted—as capitalists themselves, they were happy to be absolved of responsibility towards labour; but as labourers in their own units, they enjoyed no legal right to welfare or basic income. The Indian state since the 1990s has supported capital by openly promoting informal labour, even in large public and private registered enterprises (where labour laws are supposed to apply). Today, unprotected, informal workers are meeting unregistered and registered business demands for flexible and low-cost labour. To bolster this group of informal workers as a political actor that can disorganize a potentially powerful class of organized formal labour, the Indian state has used resources, institutions, and frameworks to officially define, sanction, count, and even offer some protection to informal workers. Throughout, the state has sustained informal workers’ anger towards formal workers for years of exclusion, and helped shape informal workers’ identity as separate from and more deserving and legitimate than formal workers. Interestingly, the state has clubbed self-employed workers’ interests with those of unprotected contract workers, by officially defining them under one umbrella of ‘informal workers’, which in turn is distinguished from the privileged minority of ‘formal workers’ and ‘entrepreneurs’. This two-pronged strategy of managing the discourse and dividing the non-agrarian working class—not by sector or caste, but by their employment relationship—enabled the post-1990s Indian state to empower capitalists (that is, constricted class struggle of the Gramscian

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variety), while retaining its own democratic legitimacy through the promotion and recognition of informal workers (that is, organized consent of the Gramscian variety). This is not, therefore, a state autonomous from class politics, but rather a state that must contend with, manage, and manipulate class politics.

Self-Employed Workers: A Class-For-Themselves? One unintended consequence of the Indian state’s promotion of selfemployment (and informal labour more generally), is opening the doors to new counter-movements, which began as early as the 1970s, grew in the 1980s, and won some victories in the 1990s and 2000s. In addition to supporting business demands to de-regulate labour and capital controls, the state has been forced to respond to the welfare demands of the mass electorate of the working poor. Most well known are the rights-based Acts: Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA); Right to Food Act; Right to Information Act; Right to Education Act; Right to Housing Act. Less highlighted are the protective legislations and welfare boards that fit their unique informal employment relationships, including the 2008 Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Act and the 1996 Construction Workers Regulation of Employment and Welfare Board Act. As well, by the 1990s, informal workers were officially counted (as individual workers, rather than just enterprises) in the government’s National Sample Survey on Employment and Unemployment (NSS), and they were invited to serve as advisors and partners in numerous government committees and policy discussions. These struggles relied on collaboration with progressive elites from above, especially in the judiciary, and citizen- and class-based groups from below (Agarwala 2018). They mobilized around identities at the intersections of class, caste, gender, and wealth strata. They sought to attain recognition for a population that has long been excluded from India’s class-based protective regulations. These trends suggest that the most important effects of India’s pro-business, liberalization turn has been to alter the politics of informal labour (Agarwala 2013). These movements are at an infant stage and cannot be compared to European social democracies. However, they lend significant insights into the making of a newly mobilized and swelling class of informally

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employed labour in the non-agrarian, so-called ‘modern’ sectors of India. Moreover, these movements show us that the power vested in the Indian state (by capital and by labour) at the time of Lakshmi is precisely what has continued to enable the Indian state to manage an altered labour relations model today—one that is no longer centrist, but rightist and leftist, and far from autonomous from capital and labour’s class power. In some cases, informal workers’ organizations have challenged the state’s attempt to divide the working class by building solidarity across informal and formal workers. For example, on 20–1 February 2013, Indian workers embarked on the largest and longest mass work strike since Independence, including the unionized and nonunionized, the formal and informal. In 2012 autoworkers, 65 per cent of whom were non-permanent contract workers, in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL) in Harayana, went on strike, demanding improved labour rights, particularly their right to unionize informal workers. In other cases, informal workers have launched innovative mobilization efforts in the rapidly growing non-manufacturing sectors. Unlike in other late-industrializing countries, growth in India’s manufacturing employment has been thin from 11 per cent in 1999 to only 13 per cent in 2011. Rather than manufacturing, agricultural labour is now turning to services and construction. Services, where labour law enforcement is notoriously weak, comprised 30.5 per cent of the labour force in 2011, indicating steady growth since 1999, where it was 25.7 per cent (NSS 2012). Construction, where labour laws are nearly absent, has served as the fastest growing labour absorber in India since 1999, with the employment share growing from 5 per cent in 1999 to 11 per cent in 2011 (NSS 2012). This trend has forced India’s poorest workers to organize in new ways that differ from twentieth-century political models based on manufacturing. Construction workers represent one of the most developed and successful efforts among informal workers to date (Agarwala 2013). Since the 1980s, Indian construction workers have organized into unions and pressured elected politicians at the state and national levels to enact new legislation to protect their working conditions and provide welfare benefits. To attain state attention, they drew on a symbolic rhetoric equating themselves to the deserving ‘poor’. At the same time,

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they struggled to create a new class-based identity and demanded recognition through state-certified workers’ identity cards, even in the absence of the employers’ formal recognition. In 1996, they succeeded in attaining a comprehensive national law designed to regulate construction work and a Cess and Welfare Act requiring all state governments to enact a welfare board for construction workers (for more, see Agarwala 2013). ‘Welfare boards’ are an innovative tripartite institution that dispense identity cards and offer some redistribution of profit from capital to informal workers in the form of welfare benefits (such as housing, education scholarships for children, health-care, funeral expenses for work-related accidents, and pensions). They are implemented by state governments and funded by the state, workers’ fees, and a tax on large builders. Through continued mobilization towards the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government, construction workers have pressured all states to enact their welfare boards. Construction Boards have amassed millions of dollars in funds. Success has varied by state. In some cases the boards are doing what they should do, in other cases disbursement of funds is scant, registration of workers is low, and politicians have abused the funds for their own political purposes. Their conditions for success and failure have been found to depend on the political and economic context in which they are implemented. Those operating under competitive populist parties (even neoliberal) have been more successful than those operating under a single, hegemonic party rule (even when the party is communist) (Agarwala 2013). While construction workers’ struggles have limitations and implementation of welfare boards is mired in predictable challenges, their victories have served as a model for other informal workers’ movements, including those among self-employed workers. Despite self-employed workers’ contradictory class location, self-employed workers in India have chosen to mobilize as a class of workers, alongside contract workers and distinct from entrepreneurs. They have not established their own political party to represent them. Rather, their political activism serves to expand the number and types of beneficiaries of state regulation and recognition to include more diverse employment relationships, as well as occupations (such as domestic work, street vending, waste-picking, home-based manufacturing), many of which are dominated by excluded minorities, such as women and members of the lowest castes.

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Domestic workers’ movements represent one of the newest groups of self-employed workers to organize as a class. Although Indian domestic workers have been organizing since the 1950s, their organizations have grown since the 2013 International Labour Organization passed Convention 189 on Domestic Work. Today, there are 69 registered domestic workers’ organizations in India; 83 per cent of these are unions and nearly all of them are exclusively female (Agarwala and Saha 2018). Following the model of construction workers, domestic workers are fighting to attain comprehensive legislation to regulate their work and provide themselves with social benefits through welfare boards. Their fight for labour legislation is as much a demand for recognition of themselves as workers as it is a demand for protection. In a context where labour-law enforcement is increasingly waning, domestic workers express their demands for legislation as a counter to the power of their employers. They have attained some legislative victories at the state level, and welfare boards in four states (although they were not designed with a funding structure). Most recently, the national government agreed to accept the registration of their unions. These victories are striking as the government continues to deny a recognition of their employment relationship. Interestingly, the cumulative failures in attaining national legislation for domestic workers, have galvanized unions into joint action at the national level. At the foundation of domestic workers’ movements has been a drawing on ‘gender’ tropes to attain national and international attention. Another group of self-employed workers who have organized in recent years are recycling-and-waste or trash collectors, most of whom are members of the lowest castes. Like domestic workers, trash collection workers have tried to expand the definition of the ‘working class’ by broadening the concept of ‘exploitation’ beyond the standard employment relationship to also include exploitation by state officials (such as municipal offices responsible for trash collection or the police who demand bribes from workers), as well as middle-class residents who employ informal trash collectors or who control public spaces (Agarwala 2015). In this way, waste collectors have fought for (and attained in many cases) state-certified identity cards that help them access existing government health and pension programmes and attain voter identity cards and ration cards for the public food distribution system—all of which require residence documentation (which these

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workers usually lack). They have also formed innovative cooperatives to ensure their access to income, such as SWaCH in Pune, through which they negotiated a municipal contract to serve as the city’s official household trash collectors and sorters. Although households claim to ‘buy’ the service of door-to-door trash collection for a ‘user fee’, wastepickers have redefined the exchange as ‘wages’. Wastepickers have also demanded that NGOs who hire waste pickers to clean public toilets as a public service pay waste pickers fair and timely wages for their work, rather than categorizing them as ‘volunteers’. Finally, a third group of self-employed workers who have organized are home-based garment workers. Indian garments constitute 30 per cent of export earnings, indicating the high value-added component of the industry (Agarwala 2015). In the state of Gujarat, all home-based garment workers and headloaders (who transport garments from homes to wholesalers and retailers on their heads or pulling handcarts) have attained identity cards from the state government. As well, they have attained a state-level welfare board that offers both productive capital and reproductive welfare: a sewing box with scissors, a table, and other tools; skills training; and Rs 1200 for medical needs. In some cities, they have negotiated collective wage/fee agreements with shop owners, who claim to ‘buy’ the finished garment pieces or the transport service. Finally, they have also redefined the unit of minimum wages to be on a piece-rate basis, rather than a time basis. They have also attained a seat on the minimum-wage advisory committee at the national level. Self-employed workers also define themselves as being exploited by urban formal workers. Formal workers’ protections and benefits, argue self-employed workers, are subsidized by the unprotected and unregulated goods and services that self-employed workers provide. Self-employed workers not only provide inputs for formal employers and workers, they enable the underpaid subset of formal and informal workers to reproduce themselves. We mention these few representative examples of budding countermovements among the self-employed to highlight the double-edged class consequences of the Indian state’s post-reform strategy. On one hand, the state has deftly succumbed to capitalist class power (although not directly observable) while still retaining democratic legitimacy with the working-class mass. On the other hand, the state’s actions have opened the door for new groups of informal workers to organize

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and demand an alternative labour protection model, often times at the local level only, but sometimes also at the national level. Herein enter Polanyi’s counter-movements, which underline the dynamic, contradictory relationship the Indian state has with class forces. As Burawoy writes, ‘If Gramsci starts out from the way civil society, through its connection to the state, organizes consent and constricts class struggle, Polanyi starts out from the way active society counteracts the dehumanizing effects of the market economy’ (Burawoy 2003, 199). To Polanyi, society is understood in its contradictory relationship to the market. ‘On the one hand, the market tends to destroy society, but on the other hand, society (re)acts to defend itself and to subordinate the market’ (Burawoy 2003, 198). After decades of being excluded from the formal labour movement, informal workers are now asserting a politics of recognition that aims to re-define who is ‘a worker’ and increase the number of beneficiaries of labour protections, and a politics of welfare that aims to highlight the reproductive costs of all workers. In the process, they are reasserting the state’s democratic responsibility to labour citizens.

Bullock Capitalists: A Class-for-Itself? Unlike self-employed workers, the community of ‘bullock capitalists’ was recognized by the Rudolphs as a significant class actor, indeed one that would ‘be at the center of political events and constellations of power’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1984, 315). They posited potential class power for this new political actor: ‘Bullock capitalists are advantageously placed by their objective circumstances to become the hegemonic agrarian class.’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1984, 319; 1987, 342). Conceptualizing surplus farmers as ‘capitalists’, as opposed to ryots or kisans, sets up a class question of politics. Materially, capitalists treat labour as an input to be paid only so much as is justified by marginal returns exceeding costs: net profit. The price of labour (and other inputs, such as credit) at a given output price determines whether or not a 5-acre wheat farmer has income sufficient to send her child to a private school, dig a deeper well, or invest in either ceremonies or equipment. But ‘capitalists’—whether bullock or otherwise—face market forces beyond their control. Cutting wages is difficult in the local moral economy for the very embeddedness in rural society implied by the bullock modification of capitalist. Though rapidly decaying, these

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institutions tie families and castes together in production and social exchange (Harriss 1982). More important in a political democracy, labourers outnumber surplus farmers—increasingly so over time. Successful political projects of capitalist farmers must contend with objectively opposed class interests. Politically, there was only one option for the bullock capitalists: a sectoral and cultural framing of collective farming interests, submerging class differences. They mobilized the rural sector around a ‘onepoint programme’: remunerative prices. Their leaders argued that only with remunerative prices could impoverished farmers afford to pay impoverished workers a living wage. So long as agriculture produces cheap food for urban consumers with low productivity, agricultural labour—whether of farmer or hired worker—will be poorly compensated. Bullock capitalists—though privileged relative to the landless and marginal—were themselves impoverished. The ‘one-point programme’ of ‘remunerative prices’ was to alter the terms of trade between agriculture and industry with guaranteed prices for output and subsidized inputs for farmers. It would, therefore, be counter-productive for landless workers to mobilize on class lines for higher wages: bankrupt farmers could pay no wages at all. Culturally, adding bullocks to the capitalist farmer formulation recognized the strategic importance of framing and ‘situated knowledge’. The Rudolphs’ earlier cultural insights in The Modernity of Tradition (1967) were at play in analysing the ‘new agrarianism’. As James Scott (1976) argued, agrarian revolts were triggered by middle peasants experiencing downward mobility that was culturally unacceptable: a violation of the ‘moral economy’ common to rural society. In mobilizing for a just share of the national social surplus, bullock capitalists deployed a symbolic politics of plow and bullock permanently rooted in rural cultural imaginations, against unproductive, even parasitic, urban elites. The cultural mobilization of Bharat vs India mirrored Michael Lipton’s (1977) materialist economic argument that it is ‘urban bias’ that ‘keeps poor people poor’, not the miserly wages of tight-fisted farmers. This resonant cultural trope knit together an objective class interest—higher profits for surplus farmers—into the fabric of a new political actor.2 This actor illustrated the Rudolphs’ theme of successful multi-stranded, culturally embedded framing: the bullock capitalists utilized successful caste-based mobilizations, namely those of ‘other backward classes/

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castes’ or OBCs, for collective material interests. Their early successes, as the Rudolphs noted, utilized a durable cultural framing: urban India’s exploitation of rural Bharat due to the skewed development policies of a central state, an internationally common model premised on prioritizing industrialization. The movement did arouse a new political actor, and did enjoy some victories at sub-national levels, and influence in short-lived coalitions at the national level (Brass 1994; Ruparelia 2015). But success proved ephemeral rather than hegemonic, in time and area. Why did the cross-class and culturally infused political mobilization of bullock capitalists ultimately fail? First, farmer ‘hegemony’ would be an astonishing outcome. Marx in the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon dismissed the political potential of peasants relative to the new industrial working class, famously equating peasants to ‘a sack of potatoes’. The middle peasantry has been an exception historically: unlike poor peasants, middle peasants had independent access to adequate means of production and could support their families on the land they controlled. They were thus not subjugated by structural dependency relations such as landless labourers or share tenants (Paige 1975). But to defend their interests, middle peasants had to recognize their class standing, agree on a feasible class political project, and engage in collective action to pursue common objectives: to make demands. The Rudolphs argued that bullock capitalists successfully organized as a ‘demand group’ that managed to ‘constrain the Indian state’ (1987, 15). Class formation, however, was impeded by cleavages of status group (caste) and community (confessional or ethnic affiliation) (Rudolph and Rudolph 1984, 310). This is a dilemma for any class seeking political power: finding both a common consciousness of interests and a programme that can sustain collective action, overriding divergent identifications and interests. Bullock capitalists faced daunting collective action problems, deeply divided by region, community, and crop (see Chapter 5 of this volume by Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan). More importantly, as surplus producing farmers—however smallscale—they represented a numerical minority; most rural households are net food purchasers, and, therefore, threatened by higher food prices demanded by the movement. This is especially true for the agrarian proletariat, increasingly not attached to anyone’s land or patronage, selling labour power in an unpredictable market, and largely without

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political representation. Surplus farmers faced class differentiation within castes affiliated with the movement, adding to disunity (see Chapter 5 of this volume by Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan). Individual solutions in the extra-agricultural economy afforded by India (affirmative action, migration) undermined solidarity of the demand group for Bharat. Farmer mobilization for debt relief and subsidies, crop by crop, state by state, undermined chances for any all-India political formation or unity of rural class demands. It became clear that skewing the terms of trade from Delhi was not going to rehabilitate classes in Bharat.

Whatever Happened to the Bullock Capitalists? The greatest victory of the bullock capitalists was the political bargain on prices and subsidies they attained in the mostly protected agrarian sector during the1970s and 1980s. Unlike Stalin, who squeezed farmers ruthlessly to acquire surplus for industrialization, the democratic Indian state had to represent farmers and win their favour. The state responded by subsidizing food costs to poor consumers and subsidizing surplus wheat and rice farmers. The Green Revolution allowed a short-term fix by dramatically raising productivity with subsidized inputs of chemicals and water. Production of food grains catapulted from 81 million tonnes in 1965 to 260 million tonnes in 2013. Foodgrain productivity increased from 591 kilograms per hectare to 2,100 kilograms per hectare in the same period. This was the developmental state in muscular form. India went from international hand-to-mouth supplicant with begging bowl to a major exporter of food (Rao, Pray, and Herring 2018). But Green Revolution technologies plateaued by the late 1980s. India’s agriculture has since experienced declining rates of growth in productivity. There was no significant growth in the yields of foodgrains in the first decade of this century. Total factor productivity in agriculture increased from 100 in 1961 to 170 in 2009, much lower than that in Brazil, China, and Indonesia (Lele et al. 2011). The first decade of the new millennium witnessed a trend growth in production of 2.7 per cent per annum, compared to a 3.4 per cent per annum during the 1990s, and 4.7 per cent per annum during the 1980s. Total factor productivity among small farmers (such as bullock capitalists) between 1980 and 2008 was only 0.28 per cent per annum for traditional crops, much less than the 1.77 per cent for the agriculture sector as a whole

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(World Bank 2014). The result was lower per capita availability of foodgrains, which in turn lowered farmers’ incomes and exacerbated rural malnutrition (Pingali, Mittra, and Rahman 2017). The growing divergence between declining agricultural growth and booming nonagricultural growth exacerbated rural-urban inequality and deepened the discrepancy between Bharat and India. Here the state proved weak, unable to buffer the rural economy from global pressures or stimulate productivity in a modern agriculture. Precisely because bullock capitalists as a class-for-itself did not become hegemonic, no national organization has come to pressure the state for moving the production frontier forward with new technology comparable to the Green Revolution. Instead, Delhi responded to rural crisis with a massive public works expansion and a public guarantee of the ‘right to work’ for all villagers for 100 days per year: MGNREGA (Marcesse 2018). Few capitalist nations guarantee a right to work. Many bullock capitalists opposed the right-to-work act, claiming it inflated rural wages and attracted workers away from farm labour. For real capitalists, this response is class-predicted. Politically, their ability to skimp on wage payments was buttressed by a second state intervention: a national ‘right to food’ act subsidizing most consumers. The rural response, however, has not been a renewed commitment to the villages, but exit. Children of farmers do not want to be farmers (Agarwal and Agrawal 2017) but are likely to take the risky leap from Bharat to India, aspiring to wage-paying jobs. Rather than a battle for Bharat as waged by the bullock capitalists, there is a scramble for a piece of India, swelling the ranks of informal and self-employed workers.

Cotton and the Modernity of Tradition Cotton is an exception to this gloomy rural scenario, but not to Bharat– India conflicts. India lags internationally in agricultural technology with one recent exception: cotton. Cotton was symbolically important in the Independence movement, but the sector lagged after Independence. In 2000, India had more acres of cotton under cultivation than any other country, but the lowest yields (Roy, Herring, and Geisler 2007). Quality cloth manufacturing depended on imports of cotton fiber; domestic production was erratic and of low quality. Vandana Shiva and colleagues published Seeds of Suicide in 1999, emphasizing the crisis in

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this most iconic of Bharat crops: How do you weave cloth for village self-sufficiency if cotton farmers are going bankrupt and committing suicide?3 Technological innovation in cotton—jump-started by a tiny seed firm in Gujarat—reversed sectoral stagnation in ways similar to the seed and nitrogen revolution of earlier decades. India today is self-sufficient in cotton, and world’s leading exporter (Rao, Pray, and Herring 2018). Modern cotton-seed technology had been supported by the developmental state beginning in the early 1990s. The model was the Green Revolution: state-led technological change for development. But there were two critical weaknesses of India’s strong–weak developmental state: first, unlike China’s, the Indian public sector failed to develop new genetically engineered hybrids useful to farmers. The technological sophistication of India failed Bharat. Second, the national state proved incapable of preventing state governments and farmers from pursuing their objective economic interests contrary to Delhi’s fiats once those interests congealed around alternative sources of new technology. Moreover, urban-based cosmopolitan networks such as Greenpeace actively subverted research and deployment of technological change in agriculture (Omvedt 2005). Urban mobilization cast Monsanto as the villain of the piece, but that story was untethered from Bharat’s ground reality. Three years before Monsanto hooked up with the Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (MAHYCO) to introduce genetically engineered hybrids, Navbharat Seeds in Ahmedabad was selling cotton seeds containing the Bt gene, registered with the State of Gujarat but not approved in New Delhi. Agriculture is a state subject in the Constitution, argued Navbharat: there is no need to ask Delhi’s permission. Neither Delhi’s panopticon nor urban-based social networks knew these seeds were in the ground until the bollworm disaster of 2001 exposed them: conventional hybrids were destroyed, Bt crops survived (Herring 2006). Once discovered and coded as genetically modified organisms, ‘GMOs’ lacking biosafety approval from Delhi, the standing crops were destroyed, fiber carted off in steel containers, and Navbharat Chief D.B. Desai charged with violating national biosafety regulations under international treaty obligations. Desi (developed locally) Bt cotton was thus made illegal; Monsanto-Mahyco got their Bt seeds approved by the remnants of the license raj and established an early

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lead in the Bt seed market. In India’s vigorous market, this advantage was soon competed away by other firms and sub-national state policies on prices responding to organized farmers. There are now more than a thousand approved Bt hybrids covering about 98 per cent of cotton land. Yields and profits improved dramatically on all-size farms in all regions (Rao and Dev 2010; Kathage and Qaim 2012). This outcome was driven by the material interests of farmers, many using bullock power and powerfully employing the themes of Bharat against India, resisting the Centre’s interference with their seed choices (Roy, Herring, and Geisler 2007). Yet technological change at this cutting edge touched no other sector of agriculture, where yield growth essentially stagnated and new technology remains officially blocked. How did a subset of farmers win against state restrictions and urban protests? Cultural memes again supported mobilization of farmers wielding ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985). Consider an illustrative example—the farmer rally at Nilkaneshwar temple on the sacred Narmada river, in 2001. Sharad Joshi, president of the Shetkari Sanghathana, then the largest farmer organization in India, was addressing a mammoth rally of farmers held to protest the Centre’s decision to destroy the cotton crop in Gujarat produced by unauthorized deshi Bt seeds. Farmers were taking a pledge with Sharad Joshi to prevent the government from touching the standing cotton crop: ‘Over our dead bodies … They will have to walk over our corpses to destroy this crop. This is our satyagraha.’ Sharad Joshi posed the question in sectoral terms: ‘This is a question of the farmer’s freedom to select his seed and access technology … Development should not be locked up in the cities. The marvel of technology should reach the villages.’ Joshi explicitly said the protests begun in Gujarat would start ‘a revolution’ as protests spread to other states. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh president Bhupendra Singh Mann spoke at the rally: ‘Give us these seeds and we will sow it in our fields in Punjab. The cotton crop that we have seen here is fantastic.’4 Nilkanteswar was a mobilization of a demand group within a class—cotton farmers producing for the market—utilizing cultural tropes drawn from a distinctly Indian symbol pool. The protest was a satyagraha; the site was the sacred Narmada. The temple is that of the blue-throat Shiva who swallowed poison to protect humanity, just as the Bt crops, farmers claimed, saved rural people from sprayed pesticides that were poisoning them and their soil—and bankrupting

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them as well. In keeping with the Rudolph’s insistence on situated knowledge, it mattered that the protest was in India, not Pakistan, where neither Shiva nor satyagraha would resonate as symbols. As the Rudolphs stressed in positing demand politics, such protests arose without political party, driven by urgent interests provoked by a distal planning Raj out of touch with rural interests depriving farmers of a profitable technology. Farmers demanded the same consideration as urban Indians, who demonstrably enjoyed the many fruits of modern technology denied to Bharat. The central government thus proved ‘weak-strong’ in politically consequential ways. Gujarat State had approved the new seeds as a registered hybrid: Navbharat 151. Delhi demanded destruction of the crop once discovered. The Government of Gujarat—led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi—flatly rejected Delhi’s demand and forced an embarrassing retreat: what is good for farmers is consistent with development, the Centre meekly conceded. Neighbouring Maharashtra state soon approved Bt cotton despite Delhi’s objection. The logic of the Maharashtra State Assembly was: our farmers demand Bt cotton and compete with Gujarati farmers who have it. Delhi dithered some months until a thin pop-up national farmers organization—the Kisan Coordinating Committee—demanded immediate approval of Bt cotton, threatening a national strike of farmers. Three days later, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee in Delhi gave approval, leading to the rapid spread of the technology to all cotton areas of India with dramatic results (Rao and Dev 2010; Kathage and Qaim 2012). The Rudolphs’ notion of demand–group politics facing a weak-strong state clarifies this significant moment in Indian agriculture. Political parties were not representing farmers’ interests, and virtually all NGOs—dominated by urban interests—opposed Bt cotton, conforming to an international narrative of ‘terminator gene’ and ‘monopoly power’ that proved ludicrously inconsistent with farmers’ experience: Gujarat developed a cottage industry for the production of illegal, unauthorized Bt seeds after Delhi’s first intervention banning Navbharat 151 (Herring 2015). This episode has a larger lesson of class: the underground proliferation of dozens of illegal Bt hybrids following Delhi’s ban reflected concrete interests of cotton producers as a class through an underground, ‘off-stage’ collective action invisible to the state and globally

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engaged activists for some time. Delhi had a strong enough state to destroy Gujarat’s Bt hybrid cotton, but not strong enough to prevent its proliferation all over India—and to Pakistan—through farmer networks. For some years Pakistan’s extensive Bt cotton cultivation was from illegal, underground farmer-bred hybrids approved by neither Delhi nor Islamabad. This was farmer power operating outside the party system that failed to incorporate farmer interests systematically. The appropriate follow to In Pursuit of Lakshmi would be a second green revolution in India, but the Indian state has provided none (Rao, Pray, and Herring 2018). Cotton dramatically illustrated the  Bharat/India divide in cutting edge technologies, as well as the Rudolph’s emphasis on the state’s weakstrong character. The state addressed—as its legitimation required—the failure in a crop that was valorized as a symbol of the Independence movement. But the Indian state had weak knees and clumsy fingers, despite very strong thumbs: no workable Bt cotton came from publicsector investments. India’s vision and initiative paralleled China, where a strong-strong state started Bt cotton development  at the same time as India but with the success expected by legitimation practices of the developmental state (Woo 1999). China succeeded in Bt cotton, but has moved on to manufacturing—largely with imports of Indian cotton. Democracy notwithstanding, Delhi was out of touch with local interests, as were the urban groups campaigning against new rural technology. In the Bt episode, it was Navbharat Seeds and D. B. Desai that got cotton improvements in the ground, not a state bureaucracy. But farmers of other crops have proved incapable of exerting the same on-stage and off-stage collective action and the state is inert. As the Rudolphs noted in their later work (2001), such failures contributed to transitions in the license raj: more market, less state.

Does Class Really Matter in Politics? The Rudolphs (1984, 281) eloquently wrote: ‘If politics is the art of the possible, it is also the art of articulating and establishing the realm of the possible’. In other words, the translation from ‘objective causes’ of action (that is, structures of class, ritual status/caste, and community/ ethnicity) to ‘subjective reasons’ for action (that is, agency) is the stuff of politics. It is not just the raw reality of life, but the meaning making,

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the consciousness raising, and the formation of identities that move people to act in their interests. As the Rudolphs correctly asserted: this translation is never automatic or ‘self-executing’. How does class fit into this translation from structure to politics? Harold Lasswell (1936) defined politics as ‘who gets what and how’. Class then is the very essence of politics, structuring political possibilities for who gets what and how. The capacity for successful mobilization (along any lines, including caste, ethnicity, or gender) varies directly with class status: capitalists’ small numbers and great resources flatten obstacles to coordination and collective action; success in large scale collective action among subordinate classes is difficult for reasons well understood in social science (Elster 1985; Wright 1997; Wade 1988). Additionally, class shapes why people want what they want. For some, material interests are a choice, not a question of survival. But subordinate classes cannot choose to forgo their interest in food, water, or healthcare. Although class fundamentally matters for politics, how it does so is not necessarily visible (to the researcher or to members of the class). Capitalists’ structural class power is easily deployed but less easily observed than activist organization and behaviour; yet we never doubt its existence. In fact, the political success of capital stems from its very invisibility, keeping certain questions off the table, delegating them to the realm of the ‘natural’ workings of the market. Weapons of the weak, which appear when less powerful classes cannot form collectively, may also be less visible, but for reasons of scale rather than intent. Weapons of the weak include everyday resistance to bosses’ sexual harassment, demands of dignity and recognition, or the breeding and sale of illicit Bt cotton seeds under the radar of state and corporations. But how fundamental is class in ‘articulating and establishing the realm of the possible’? At times, class identities single-handedly make and re-make the realm of the possible. E. P. Thompson taught us that. But more often, certainly in India, class identities meld with ascriptive identities—such as caste, sector, ethnicity, language, or gender. Ascriptive identities are typically easier to mobilize because they are articulated in everyday life. Moreover, they represent what Joan Acker (2006) called ‘illegitimate regimes of inequality’, as opposed to class inequalities, which in capitalist societies hold a degree of ‘legitimacy’. But ascriptive identities are mutually determinative of class identities.

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It is no accident that most landless labourers in rural India and most live-in domestic workers in urban India are ‘low’ caste. In translating objective conditions to subjective reasons, all identities form parts of a shared tool kit of movement strategies and repertoires. Individuals have multiple identities and interests, stimulated to political significance in context-dependent ways. But class remains among the most basic of these interest structures, as it determines so much of ‘who gets what and how’. Yet class has borne a curious burden in Indian studies, a suspicion rooted in Cold War polemics, as a concept alien to and in competition with other forms of stratification (Herring and Agarwala 2006). It is undeniable that some incarnations of class analysis marginalized other systems of privilege and subordination, such as caste and gender. Still, it is astonishing that we can think and write about a country so egregiously rich-poor with so vigorous a democratic tradition and interventionist state and yet maintain that class somehow doesn’t matter to politics. Despite their lack of attention to class power at the rich end of the rich-poor society, the Rudolphs gave us an extraordinary guide to understanding why and how exertion of class power from the bottom of Indian society has proved so difficult. In their early works, they centred the all-powerful Indian state, as well as individual leaders’ inability to translate the poor’s paltry conditions into coordinated reasons for collective action. In their later work, however, they noted the fraying of India’s developmental state with the demise of the hegemonic Congress Party yielding to multi-party coalition politics, central planning yielding to the market economy, and Delhi yielding to local state power centres. These alterations in the developmental state and class configurations represent an urgent research agenda for our time. In this chapter, we note an increasing blurring of traditional class lines in contemporary India. This is true in the agricultural and nonagricultural spheres, in rural and urban landscapes, in Bharat and in India. Self-employed urban workers who are unable to earn enough to reproduce themselves will necessarily demand production inputs (such as a sewing machine or access to waste); but they will also require lower social consumption costs in healthcare, housing, and education. Cotton farmers, whose livelihood depends on their profit margins, will necessarily demand technological advances that increase their

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productivity, but their poor margins may necessitate state support for their social welfare. We also note these groups’ political mobilizations from below have demanded more and more of the Indian state as a matter of rights. Successful organizational repertoires have not been limited to class identities, although class interests fundamentally shape their demands. ‘Bullock capitalists’ have continued to draw on prior mobilization efforts sporadically and unevenly to demand better prices, debt remission and better technology. Self-employed workers have eschewed the cultural trope of Bharat, instead aligning themselves with the nonagricultural workers of modern India. When the promises of modern, growing India failed them, however, they employed non-class identities such as ‘gender’, ‘caste’, and ‘the poor’ to attain state attention. Unlike formal workers of the twentieth century, self-employed workers and vulnerable strata of society have not attached to a single political party, but appealed to any political party that will meet their basic human needs (Thachil and Herring 2008; Agarwala 2013). These efforts aim to re-make the realm of politics by articulating new political actors in modern India. And they have yielded some victories: after being criminalized, punished, and (at best) ignored for decades, informal workers have altered the state’s labour force surveys to officially recognize and count them as workers and forced the state to expand regulatory protections to include their occupations, many of which are dominated by women and lower castes. At the local level, self-employed workers have successfully forced the state to revise minimum-wage regulations (from time-based to piece-rate), ensured exclusive service work contracts with the municipalities, revised publicspace access laws for their businesses, and attained some welfare provisions from the state. Bullock capitalists won sporadic debt and tax relief for farmers and greater representation in the ruling party through politicians from southern and western states, rural areas, and nondominant castes—all of whom had long been outnumbered by highcaste, urban elites from north India (Ruparelia 2015). Contemporary cotton farmers have forced New Delhi to reverse policies that ignored rural material interests in new cotton technologies. But these efforts from below also show that contradictory class positions, when mobilized, result in contradictory state responses. The centrist Indian state of the Rudolphs has inched leftward and rightward

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simultaneously. In the very long view, both the Rudolphs and Polanyi (1944) were right. Polanyi’s great insight was that the commodification of land and labour put social values at risk. Defensive reactions from the state would be necessary to reinstate values violated by the making of market society: the commoditization of everything. The very failure of bullock capitalists to become a hegemonic class, as the Rudolphs thought they might, left a rural sector unrepresented, with impoverished owners of capital facing impoverished workers. Peasant society as envisioned by Gandhi was gone. Labour freed from security on the land—however demeaning and impoverished—sought security in a precarious and informal market economy in the non-agricultural realm. State and market have consistently failed to deliver on promises of mobility for all, and this failure is fought out on different scales with different political tools across the nation. With this understanding, reasserting a class analytic is not equivalent to romanticizing an illusory victory among subordinate classes— quite the contrary. A class lens on politics—whether of activism or quiescence, whether of dominant classes or subordinate classes—can illuminate the paradox of poor majorities remaining poor and politically ineffective in vibrant democracies. Whether forces espousing alteration of the class structure win or lose in any particular juncture, class remains a pervasive force in the many forms politics may take, and in itself profoundly influences future distributions of life chances and new forms of politics.

Endnotes 1. The other two sub-sets of informal workers are: ‘regular-informal’ workers (who have a formal work contract with an employer but receive no non-wage benefits) and ‘casual’ workers (who work for an employer but have no work contract and receive no non-wage benefits). 2. See, for example, Lindberg (1995); Teitelbaum (2007); Youngblood (2016); Brass (1995); Varshney (1995). 3. For a sober view by an economist who knows rural India, see Vaidyanathan (2006). 4. For sources, elaboration and details, see Joshi (2001); Scoones (2003); Herring (2006, 2007); Ramaswamy et al. (2016). On Shetkari Sanghatana, Youngblood (2016).

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References Acker, Joan. 2006. ‘Inequality Regimes Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations’. Gender and Society 20 (4): 441–64. Agarwal, B., and A. Agrawal. 2017. ‘Do Farmers Really Like Farming? Indian Farmers in Transition’. Oxford Development Studies 45 (4): 460–78. Agarwala, Rina. 2013. Informal Labour, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent in India. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. ‘Re-defining Exploitation: Self-Employed Workers’ Movements in India’. International Labour and Working-Class History 89: 107–30. ———. 2019a. ‘The Politics of India’s Reformed Labour Model’. Business and Politics in India, edited by Christophe Jaffrelot, Atul Kohli, and Kanta Murali, 95–123. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2019b. ‘Using Legal Empowerment for Labour Rights in India’. Journal of Development Studies 55 (3): 401–41. Available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220388.2018.1451631. Last accessed on 10 February 2020. Agarwala, Rina, and Shiny Saha. 2018. ‘The Employment Relationship and Movement Strategies among Domestic Workers in India’. Critical Sociology 44 (7–8): 1207–23. Available at https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/597f/a2d6b 387ddffdda7b9a3c164ef2af35acc23.pdf. Last accessed on 10 February 2020. Bardhan, Pranab K. 1984. The Political Economy of Development in India. Oxford: Blackwell. Bhowmik, Sharit K. 2015. ‘Protecting Employers against Workers and Trade Unions: New Bill on Industrial Relations’. Economic and Political Weekly 1 (29): 15–18. Brass, Tom. 1994. ‘Introduction: The New Farmers’ Movements in India’. The Journal of Peasant Studies 21 (3–4): 3–26. Burawoy, Michael. 2003. ‘For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi’. Politics and Society 31 (2): 193–261. Chibber, Vivek. 2003. Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Desai, Meghnad, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, and Asok Rudra, eds. 1984. Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity In South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dev, Mahendra, and Nu Chandrasekhara Rao. 2010. ‘Agricultural Price Policy, Farm Profitability and Food Security’. Economic and Political Weekly 45 (26/27): 174–82. Drèze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 1996. Indian Development. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Harriss, J. 1982. Capitalism and Peasant Farming: Agrarian Structure and Ideology in Northern Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Heller, Patrick. 1999. The Labour of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Herring, R. J. 2006. ‘Why Did “Operation Cremate Monsanto” fail? Science and Class in India’s Great Terminator Technology Hoax. Critical Asian Studies 38 (4): 467–93. ———. 2007. ‘Stealth Seeds: Biosafety, Bioproperty, Biopolitics’. Journal of Development Studies 43 (1): 130–57. ———. 2015. ‘State Science, Risk and Agricultural biotechnology: Bt Cotton to Bt Brinjal in India’. Journal of Peasant Studies 42 (1): 159–86. Herring, R. J., and N. C. Rao. 2012. ‘On the “Failure of Bt Cotton’: Analyzing a Decade of Experience’. Economic and Political Weekly 47 (18): 45–54. Herring, Ronald, and Rina Agarwala. 2006. ‘Introduction: Restoring Agency to Class: Puzzles from the Subcontinent’. Critical Asian Studies 38 (4): 323–57. ——— eds. 2008. Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from a Subcontinent. London/New Delhi: Routledge/Daanish. Kathage, J., and Martin Qaim. 2012. ‘Economic Impacts and Impact Dynamics of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) Cotton in India’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (29) (July): 11652–6. Kohli, Atul. 1987. The State and Poverty in India: The Politics of Reform. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Lele, U., M. Agarwal, P. Timmer, and S. Goswami. 2011. ‘Patterns of Agricultural and Structural Transformation in 109 Developing and Developed Countries with Special Focus on Brazil, China, Indonesia and India’. Paper presented at the workshop on Policy Options and Investment Priorities for Accelerating Agricultural Productivity and Development in India, New Delhi. Lipton, M. 1977. Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias and World Development. Temple Smith, London: Harvard University Press. Mallick, R. 1994. Indian Communism. New York: Oxford University Press. Marcesse, T. 2018. ‘Public Policy Reform and Informal Institutions: The Political Articulation of the Demand for Work in Rural India’. World Development 103 (March): 284–96. NCL. 1969. ‘Report of the National Commision on Labour (NCL) Employment and Rehabilitation’. Delhi: Ministry of Labour, Government of India. NSS. 2012. ‘National Sample Survey on Employment and Unemployment, 68th Round, 2011–2012’. Edited by Ministry of Statistics. New Delhi: National Sample Survey Organisation, Government of India. Paige, J. M. 1975. Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World. New York: Free Press.

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Papola, T. S., and Jesim Pais. 2007. ‘Debate On Labour Market Reforms In India: A Case of Misplaced Focus’. The Indian Journal of Labour Economics 50 (2): 183–200. Pingali, P., B. Mittra, and A. Rahman. 2017. ‘The Bumpy Road from Food to Nutrition Security—Slow Evolution of India’s Food Policy’. Global Food Security 15 (May): 77–84. Rao, Chandrasekhara, Carl Pray, and Ronald Herring. 2018. Biotechnology for a Second Green Revolution in India. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Rao, N.C., and M. Dev. 2010. Biotechnology in Indian Agriculture: Potential, Performance, and Concerns. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. Rudolph, Lloyd, and Susanne Rudolph. 1984. ‘Determinants and Varieties of Agrarian Mobilization’. In Agrarian Poverty and Agricultural Productivity in South Asia, edited by Meghnad Desai, Susanne Rudolph, and Ashok Rudra, 281–344. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. ‘Redoing the Constitutional Design: From an Interventionist to a Regulatory State.’ In The Success of India’s Democracy, edited by Atul Kohli, 127–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudolph, Susanne, and Lloyd Rudolph. 2002. ‘New Dimensions in Indian Democracy’. Journal of Democracy 13 (1): 52–66. Ruparelia, Sanjay. 2015. Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sanyal, Kalyan. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge. Scott, James. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sinha, Aseema. 2003. ‘Rethinking The Developmental State Model: Divided Leviathan and Subnational Comparisons In India’. Comparative Politics 35 (4): 459–76. Vaidyanathan, A. 2006. ‘Farmers’ Suicides and the Agrarian Crisis’. Economic and Political Weekly 41 (38): 4009–13. Varshney, A. 1995. Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India. Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, E. 1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper and Row. Wright, E. O. 1997. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Youngblood, M. 2016. Cultivating Community: Interests, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization. Pasadena: South Asian Studies Association.

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Interpreting the Political Economy of the Indian State Culture, Inequality, and the Conceptual Possibilities of In Pursuit of Lakshmi

leela fernandes

T

he political economy of the Indian state has undergone significant shifts in recent decades. Initial stages of economic reforms from the mid-1980s to the 1990s have produced a visible transition in the national political culture. Political parties and mainstream public opinion have embraced policies of economic liberalization in ways that have produced a change in ideational views of the role of the state in managing India’s economy. While there are debates on the pace of economic reforms in practice (in both the making and implementation of state policies), there has nevertheless been a clear break from the kind of developmental state that the Rudolphs analysed in their landmark work In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (1987).1 In Pursuit of Lakshmi engaged in a comprehensive study of the ways in which a strong independent state structured India’s political economy and moderated political trends in the early decades after Independence. Much has changed in the contemporary political and economic life in India over the three decades since the publication of this text.2 Given the ideational and policy shifts in the context of successive phases of economic reform, the Rudolphs’ framework would appear to have been overtaken by the force of political and economic change. The Rudolphs themselves analysed the shift from India’s heavyhanded planned developmental state to a regulatory state in the postreform period (2002).3 Despite the weight of economic and political Leela Fernandes, Interpreting the Political Economy of the Indian State: Culture, Inequality, and the Conceptual Possibilities of In Pursuit of Lakshmi. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190125011.003.0007

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change in twenty-first-century India, In Pursuit of Lakshmi provides a vital and underutilized intellectual foundation for the development of an interpretive, qualitative framework that remains important for the study of political economy in India and in a comparative perspective. One of the cornerstones of Rudolph’s intellectual legacy rests in their embrace of social constructivism informed by the interpretive depth gained through immersion in a contextual area-based understanding of contemporary India. Their intellectual approach, as is well known, provided a steady and unwavering counterpoint to trends in political science that increasingly valorized rational actor models of political behaviour, quantitative analysis, and cross-national comparative frameworks.4 Such hegemonic norms have been especially weighty in the field of comparative political economy, which has been more resistant to conceptual and methodological change in contrast to other areas of the discipline of political science.5 Given the economistic underpinnings of the field, the study of political economy is still largely shaped by the dominance of quantitative, cross-national, and rationalist approaches. A noteworthy feature of this intellectual trajectory is that political scientific scholarship on the Indian political economy has tended to deviate from this trend. In contrast to disciplinary trends, political scientists writing about India have more often than not departed from or challenged dominant approaches of the discipline. The Rudolphs’ scholarship was part of a larger body of political scientific scholarship on India that produced foundational in-depth qualitative research on the production and politics of systemic socio-economic inequality and on the possibilities of and constraints on social and political change (Frankel 1979; Herring 1983; Kohli 1987). Political science scholarship on India has for the most part been grounded in field-based research and, more often than not, used a single case study approach. In more recent years, scholarship on India has tailored this single case study approach to disciplinary norms through a comparison of local states within India or through the deployment of a mixed-method model, which has also become a new disciplinary norm. Nevertheless, scholarship on political economy in India has continued to value both fieldwork and methodological pluralism. The distinctive nature of the Rudolphs’ intellectual challenge to dominant trends in the discipline is thus not simply reducible to a

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call for methodological pluralism, or the value of field-based or qualitative case study research. Rather, their approach to political economy in their work In Pursuit of Lakshmi represents a specific kind of epistemological challenge to conventional disciplinary understandings of political economy that goes beyond methodological debates about quantitative versus qualitative or comparative versus single case study approaches. What is distinctive about the Rudolphs’ intervention is the way in which they developed the intellectual groundwork for a distinctive understanding of the systemic relationship between political economy and cultural identity.6 This approach prefigured the rise of social constructivist approaches, which the Rudolphs would later fully embrace, and was located at a distinctive intersection between the fields of comparative politics, political theory, and South Asian area studies.7 The conceptual innovations of In Pursuit of Lakshmi lie in a framework of analysis that explicitly sought to analyse the relationship between structures of political economy on the one hand and the cultural politics of religion and region on the other. While political and economic developments in later decades would unsettle many of the Rudolphs’ claims, it is the significance of this theoretical approach for understanding the terrain of political economy that has been overlooked and increasingly foreclosed by disciplinary trends in the study of political economy in political science. The Rudolphs’ conception of the political economy of the state was one that rested on an argument that the distinctive nature of the relationship between class and cultural identity produced a centrist orientation that undergirded the politics and policies of the Indian state. The complex and intricate analysis of political and economic trends in the text is shaped by an underlying theoretical project (informed by the Rudolphs’ expertise in the field of political theory) that was fundamentally grappling with the conceptual and empirical relationship between class and cultural identity. This chapter will engage in a critical discussion of the theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights of the Rudolphs’ distinctive approach to the political economy of the Indian state. The value of the constructivist, culturalist approach to the study of political economy has declined in more recent political scientific scholarship that has addressed questions of political economy in India. While, as I have

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noted, such work has in many ways continued to depart from dominant trends in the discipline that have promoted large cross-national quantitative research and rational choice models, there has been less attention paid to the value of centring constructivist, cultural analysis within the field of political economy.8 Reopening this conceptual space can enrichen the study of political economy in a number of ways. Constructivist approaches ask how interests, identities, and modes of political action come into being through complex sets of historical, cultural, and social processes. For instance, constructivist approaches can ask how cultural meanings and identities shape the ways in which individuals and social groups conceive of their interests and may shape both individual and collective political responses to economic change. Constructivist approaches can also lead to a theoretically informed approach to the study of political economy that asks how social categories, such as socio-economic class, are shaped by specific histories and cultures of particular local and national contexts. This chapter will seek to develop and expand this conceptual space through a close critical reading of In Pursuit of Lakshmi. The chapter will focus on three central dimensions of such a framework. First, it addresses the significance of the Rudolphs’ conceptual and empirical work in systematically connecting an analysis of the political economy of the Indian state with culturally specific frames of identity. Second, it analyses, the tension between this broadening of our understandings of identity and inequality and some of the limits of the Rudolphs’ analysis of inequality and socio-economic class. Finally, it reflects on the continued significance of the Rudolphs’ interpretative approach to the study of political economy that (in keeping with their long intellectual legacy) challenges recent trends in the discipline of political science and, more specifically, in the subfield of comparative politics. While the chapter will focus on an in-depth discussion of In Pursuit of Lakshmi, it will also address some of their later work that has analysed the post-liberalization period. Through this analysis, the chapter will attempt to lay out some of the untapped conceptual and methodological interventions of the Rudolphs’ interpretative approach to political economy that move beyond the existing disciplinary norms and that remain invaluable for an adequate understanding of political and economic trends in contemporary India.

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Lakshmi and the Contours of the Rudolphs’ Interpretive Political Economy In Pursuit of Lakshmi presents a complex and textured study of India’s political economy that draws on historical, institutional, political, economic, and cultural frames of analysis. The text deploys a ‘thick description’ of political and economic life in India in order to explain the central political and economic trends of the first four decades of the post-Independence period. This adaptation of Geertzian interpretive methods broke in significant ways from existing disciplinary models of scholarship on political economy that were dominant in political science. Reflecting on the use of the goddess Lakshmi in their title, the Rudolphs explicitly noted that their intent was to use the metaphor as a discursive intervention in an increasingly homogenized language of political economy. As they elaborated, It is precisely the exotic nature of Lakshmi’s name, as it intrudes into the homogenized, decultured language of political economy, that forces the reader to recognize political economy has to accommodate the unique or the particular as well as the universal. The name serves as a bridge, a way of translating our concerns as Western social scientists into a salient indigenous category. Invoking Lakshmi is an effort in translation, an effort to relate terms from otherwise alien systems of meaning (e.g., West and East, United States and India, social sciences and humanities) in ways that make them mutually intelligible and add value to both sides. Put another way, it is an effort to create through the metaphor of Lakshmi a commensurable yet liminal language, a term that in context lies ‘in between’ alien language communities but that speaks to both. (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 393)

In the Rudolphs’ conception, the terms and concepts of political economy were not self-evident, nor were they reducible to economistic models or projects of measurement. For them, the disciplinary terms of political economy formed a language that needed to be qualified, informed, and rethought through an interpretive immersion in the contextual specificities of contemporary India. From a post-colonial theoretical perspective that now informs South Asian studies, the Rudolphs’ characterization of Lakshmi as an ‘exotic category’ or their invocation of oppositions between ‘West’ and ‘East’ provides a troubling echo of orientalist discourses (Said 1979).

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However, such an easy discursive reading misses the deeper epistemological challenge of the Rudolphs’ approach.9 The Rudolphs characterized their study of political economy as a project of cultural translation that called into question theories and models of political economy that merely applied universal concepts derived from the ‘West’ or the United States of America onto the ‘particular’ context of India (what they termed the ‘imperialism of categories’). Cultural translation, for the Rudolphs, was not a project of rendering the particular context of India legible within the existing epistemic terms of political science. Rather, they conceptualized the epistemic contexts of both the discipline and of India as ‘alien systems of meaning’ that must be brought together in conversation. In this endeavour they challenged two existing approaches to the study of political economy—dependency theory and rational choice. While dependency theory has not shaped the discipline in significant or lasting ways, their challenge to what they termed ‘the decade of methodological individualism and rational choice’ (1987, 395) in the 1980s is of continued import, given the ways in which this intellectual trend has transformed the study of political economy. The Rudolphs’ critique of methodological individualism and rational choice directly challenged the conceptual foundation of a framework that took for granted a universalized conception of political and economic action based on the choices of ‘self-determined, egotistic individuals’ (1987, 395). Such a conception produced political economic models in which, they argued, ‘society, culture, the state, ideologies, and worldviews are epiphenomenal, mere aggregations of the choices of rational individuals’ (1987, 396). They specifically sought to illustrate that the interpretive depth of their case study approach was necessary for an adequate explanation of economic and political trends in India. Political economy, as they argued, must be delved with ‘on the ground, as it is known and practiced in history’ (1987, 395). The interpretive case study approach was not, in this vein, a limited site for the elaboration of universalizing concepts but a crucial ground for conceptual rethinking that would shape the explanation of political–economic outcomes. As Vivien Schmidt also puts it, they argued for a place for the ‘values of contingency, thick description, nonlinearity, meaning, multiplicity of truth, contextualism, and subjective knowledge’ (Chapter 3 of this volume). Such an approach is distinctive from the mixed methods model in which ethnographic thick description

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is often used as a means of descriptively fleshing out hypotheses that are first proved through the use of quantitative or comparative methods. Interpretive methods, in line with their anthropological roots, were not deployed to fine-tune or supplant more scientific methods (along the lines of dominant disciplinary mixed methods models). Interpretive method, in the Rudolphs’ work, was the scientific method that they used to explain systemic trends in contemporary events and to rethink theoretical categories of analysis. For instance, in the case of In Pursuit of Lakshmi the Rudolphs used the Indian case to rethink concepts of class and state in order to explain India’s centrist economic and political path in the decades after Independence. ‘Thick description’, in line with Geertz’s work (1977), was not the same as ‘description’ in the Rudolphs’ interpretive understanding of the Indian political economy. This underlying theoretical and methodological challenge of In Pursuit of Lakshmi took to the field of political economy the Rudolphs’ longstanding challenge to the discipline of political science to wrestle with the way that culture matters. For the Rudolphs, this meant moving beyond conventional disciplinary understandings of culture either as a static variable to be measured or as clothing for a universalistic model of political behaviour. An adequate understanding of culture required a deep engagement with the ‘webs of significance’ that gave people’s lives, interests, and activities meaning and that provided a central foundation for a proper understanding of political and economic behaviour. The Rudolphs’ early work drew heavily on this Geertzian approach to the study of culture.10 For the Rudolphs, studying culture entailed grappling with the ways in which people gave meaning to their lives and understanding that such meaning shaped the ways in which they understood their interests. Culture shaped both the broader context of political action and the political subjectivities of individuals and social groups. A study of culture was, therefore, central to understanding how individuals and social groups understood and responded to their economic circumstances. In Pursuit of Lakshmi, in this sense, was a work of political economy that concretized their earlier critiques of modernization theory that presumed singular (and opposed) models of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. As they sought to argue two decades earlier in The Modernity of Tradition, ‘traditional’ cultural practices ranging from Gandhi’s religious practices to caste associations could serve as alternative bases for modern democratic thought and civic associational

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life in ways that Western-centric conceptions of modernization failed to grasp (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). In this endeavour, the Rudolphs were making a distinctive intervention that distinguished it from a broader qualitative trend in scholarship on India in political science. The Rudolphs were prying open the terrain of political economy in ways that could bring in a systematic analysis of cultural identity. This endeavour was influenced by their explicit and implicit engagement with the field of political theory. For instance, their deep intellectual training and expertise in Weberian thought brought a theoretical lens to their study of political economy that departed from empiricist trends in the field. In particular, the Rudolphs’ explanation of India’s political and economic path in the first four decades after Independence rested on a theoretical and empirical argument about the relationship between the state, class, and cultural identity. It is this relationship then that needs unpacking in order to fully understand both the force and limitations of the Rudolph’s interventions in the field of political economy and in their explanation of political and economic trends in India, in particular. This chapter delves into such possibilities by building on, expanding, and critically engaging with the Rudolphian approach. My approach builds on their conception of culture as situated webs of significance that shape interests, identities, and modes of action.11 However, I expand this dimension by foregrounding the links between culture and inequality. Culture in this second dimension is also about the resources and forms of power that stem from caste, ethnicity, religion, gender, and class. While the Rudolphs addressed questions of caste, ethnicity and religion, they stopped short of exploring the cultural dimensions of class (as an identity, social location, and analytical category). While they pried open broader economistic categories such as modernization, class remained a self-evident economic category that they juxtaposed to other culturally oriented categories. Expanding the Rudolphian endeavour in this way opens up our conceptual understandings of political responses to inequality and change.

India’s Political Economy: Class, State, and the Question of Culture The relationship between the state and class has been an underlying issue that has haunted scholarly work on Indian political economy.

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The reproduction of socio-economic inequality has persisted in contemporary India and the value of class analysis for the study of Indian political economy has periodically surfaced and declined in the social sciences.12 In Pursuit of Lakshmi, paradoxically, both foregrounded and depleted the significance of the relationship between class and the state through their delineation of a specific form of Indian exceptionalism. For the Rudolphs, the specific nature of the class–state relationship in India had in effect blunted the force of class conflict and foreclosed the rise of significant national class-based parties along the lines of the European model of socialist-leaning parties. In India, class-based parties with electoral strength had been regionally limited to the particular states of Kerala and West Bengal. They located their explanation of this form of Indian exceptionalism in two key factors. First, they argued that the role of India’s strong state as the prime and overarching independent economic actor in the early decades of Independence effectively blunted the traditional political and economic conflict between labour and private capital. They argued instead that the state’s economic dominance (as owner and employer in the public sector) ‘makes class politics marginal, [so that] the state is itself an element in the creation of the centrist-oriented social pluralism that has characterized Indian politics since independence’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 13). The second dimensions of the Rudolphs’ argument of exceptionalism focused on the relationship between politics and culture. They argued that the specific nature of the Indian context was such that cultural identities served as a more significant basis for political mobilization than the more abstract identity of class. As they put it, in a context where social and economic inequalities, exclusions, and grievances did produce conflict, ‘religious and regional ideologies have often proved more accessible, meaningful, and effective in the defense of interests than more abstract and less familiar secular ideologies of class, nationalism, or citizenship’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 9). In their approach, the Rudolphs were in effect distinguishing between the empirical and analytical use of the category of class on one hand and the political significance of class as a basis for political activity in India on the other hand. This distinction marked an underlying paradox in their analysis of the salience of class for an understanding of the political economy of the Indian state. Their work in many ways foregrounded the empirical and analytical salience of the category of class even as it

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downplayed the significance of class politics within the Indian context. For instance, their analysis of the social category of ‘bullock capitalists’ captured what they argued was a distinctive group of independent cultivators. However, they argued that this distinctive Indian social group was less prone to a politics of class conflict and, therefore, strengthened the centrist trend in Indian politics (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 50). Meanwhile, the dependent nature of organized labour through both the economic dependence on the state and political dependence on political parties weakened labour movements and produced a form of fragmented unionism that foreclosed the emergence of a strong, unified national labour movement. This dependence, as the Rudolphs would accurately note, was compounded by the elite orientation of conventional unions that at the time marginalized the vast proportion of workers in the informal sector. While this analysis of the socioeconomic formations shaping Indian political economy was clearly engaging with class as both an empirical and analytical category, their claim regarding Indian exceptionalism rested on the political argument that class inequality and what they would term the ‘rich–poor’ paradox of India did not translate into political mobilization or claims that were based on class identity. The distinctive nature of class formation in India, in their view, foreclosed this possibility. Political mobilization, in the Rudolphs’ view, remained on the terrain of culture and played out through the mobilization of caste, religion, and ethnicity. While this exceptionalist argument relegated the political power of class mobilization to the background, their analysis contains the intellectual potential for a deeper reframing of Indian political economy that the Rudolphs themselves left unexplored. Their conceptualization was limited by their delineation of a particular kind of relationship between class and cultural identity. In their view, the distinctive historical and cultural context of India made secular ideologies of class less politically powerful than appeals based on religion, caste, and ethnicity. In this framework, class and cultural identity represented distinct and opposing political forces. What was foreclosed by this political verdict was the potential to theoretically reconceptualize the relationship between class and cultural identity in ways that would allow for a rethinking of the languages of class that were shaping Indian politics. There is a vast historical literature that has shown the myriad ways in which culture has shaped processes of class formation in comparative

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contexts. E.P. Thompson’s classic study showed the significance of cultural traditions in shaping the making of the English working class. Later historical work both built on (Sewell 1980) and complicated Thompson’s understanding of class formation. Such work has ranged from Stedman Jones’s argument (1983) that we attend to the everyday languages of class that often do not correspond to conventional Marxian categories, to the ways in which meanings of class may take exclusionary form, as with the case of white working-class communities in the United States of America (Roediger 1991). Languages of class may not have been visibly apparent, precisely because they were being coded by the very modes of meaning-making and contextual particularity that the Rudolphs sought to foreground. In other words, this did not point to an absence of class as a salient political identity but to a form of class identity that did not conform to the abstract secular languages that the Rudolphs rightly found to be less politically potent in India. The wealth of research that historians have produced, that has illuminated the complexity of class formation and the cultural dimensions of class, can enrich our understanding of India in central ways. Historians of India have paid attention to the ways in which rural ties and inequalities, such as caste and religion, shaped the formation of the working class (Chakrabarty 1989; Chandavarkar 1994). This has meant that everyday meanings of class are shaped by the webs of significance that stem from the religious, caste, and ethnic communities of workers. Furthermore, caste and religion are also sources of cultural inequality that shape the socio-economic dimensions of class. These historical factors continue to shape the politics and political economy of India in varied ways. For instance, religion stratifies working-class communities in ways that have allowed Hindu nationalist organizations to produce an exclusionary Hindu-oriented conception of class mobilization (Hansen 2001). Or consider Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan’s analysis of intra-caste socio-economic differentiation (Chapter 5 of this volume). While they do not engage in an extensive theoretical discussion of social categories, their empirical analysis provides an important example of the complex relationship between caste and class that continues to shape contemporary India. The reconceptualization of class that I am discussing thus holds important implications for the ways in which we understand identity, inequality, and political attitudes and action in contemporary India.

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The potential for this rethinking of class was recognizably present in the theoretical space that the Rudolphs’ approach to political economy opened up. Consider, for instance, the ways in which they conceptualized the terrain of political economy as a complex formation that was shaped by both materialist and discursive processes.13 Writing about the historical formation of the Indian political economy they argued, [I]ndustrialization seemed to Gandhi an unlikely way to become or remain civilized. … The limits of growth for Gandhi were moral as well as social. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India introduced another understanding of political economy more in keeping with the language of the modernist West, its language supplanted Gandhi’s in the public discourse of independent India. … Together, Gandhi and Nehru made languages of political economy an important aspect of India’s public discourse. (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 395)

Their framing here began to pry open the terrain of political economy in ways that addressed the role of discursive processes in shaping the direction of national economic policies at the dawn of India’s Independence. Reworking the Rudolphs’ conception of the mutually constitutive nature of language and the economy, it is possible then to ask how language and class are also intertwined in India. From such a perspective, languages of class may themselves be shaped by and not necessarily remain in opposition to cultural identities. The Rudolphs’ intricate empirical analysis contains hints of this possibility. For instance, they note that ‘migration and the politics of region and religion feed on each other, as “locals” and “foreigners” (outsiders) struggle for their fair share of whatever benefits and opportunities a slowly expanding economy makes available’ (1987, 9). Such ‘sons of the soil’ movements have for instance been evident in places such as Mumbai and Assam. Such an exclusionary language of class (Roediger 1991; Stedman Jones 1983) would compete with the secular languages of class that conventional Marxian conceptions have adhered to (for instance, through communist party ideologies in states such as West Bengal and Kerala). My early work on working-class politics in India specifically sought to open up this kind of theoretical space. Drawing on in-depth

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ethnographic methods that had not yet entered the mainstream of political science scholarship (with the rare exception of James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak [1987]) but which were very much in line with the Rudolphs’ interpretive approach to the study of politics and political economy, I illustrated the ways in which both the structural and discursive dimensions of working-class formation and class-based forms of political mobilization were expressed through culturally specific languages of religion and ethnicity (Fernandes 1997). Class politics, in other words, was not restricted to the conventional terrain of formal union organizations or class-based political parties but could also be found in a wide range of activities including women’s daily practices of resistance, workers’ community organizations, and cultural modes of expression, such as religious rituals and festivals. As I argued, drawing on the case of jute mill workers, one of the classic historical industries in India, identities such as caste, ethnicity, or gender are not merely external cultural identities or ideologies but also constitutive of the structure of ‘the working class’. Such an approach departs from a conception that assumes that an analytical logic of class is an external or prior foundation that is then linked to discursive formations or cultural identities. Structure is neither static nor unitary in this conception. For instance, ‘cultural’ identities often play a central role in processes of labour recruitment and division of labour in the production of workforce in both organized and informal sectors. I am referring here to the ways in which cultural ties create and distribute forms of resources in a manner that can, in turn, produce inequality or inclusion. In this case, caste and ethnicity may mediate the ways in which workers gain access to employment; meanwhile certain sectors are often shaped through gendered constructions of men’s work or women’s work. In this process, class structuration does not precede but is produced through social networks that are shaped by cultural identities such as gender, caste, religion, and identity. Given this multidimensioned form of structure, any analysis of the political significance of class politics must break from a predefined conception of the appropriate vehicles for mobilization or of the kinds of mobilization (and the languages they deploy) that signify class politics. My research on working-class politics, for instance, illustrated the ways in which religious festivals, such as the Durga Puja, Vishwakarma Puja, Shivratri, and the Id festival, represented public events that served as

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a site for class politics and resistance (Fernandes 1997, 1998). Trade union leaders, including those associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal, were actively involved in organizing and participating in such festivals. Cultural politics in this context was integral to promoting class mobilization. Union leaders would draw on cultural languages to mobilize workers in their claims on management. The question of whether such culturally rooted languages of class lead to exclusionary forms of mobilization is not predetermined but contingent on the modes of organization and political expression of the context in question. Political leaders (including union leaders), organizations, and parties can shape the form and direction of such mobilizations. My research on the jute mills showed that such culturally specific languages of class deepened working-class mobilizations without producing divisive politics that pitted workers against each other. On the other hand, as anthropological work has shown, organizations such as the Shiv Sena have effectively transformed such cultural languages into mechanisms for exclusionary political action. Regardless of the ideological orientation of such political mobilization, the ways in which such cultural languages are the means through which workers conceive of their identities, interests, and communities are significant.14 This analysis challenges both the argument of Indian exceptionalism and any project of asserting the theoretical and political significance of class politics in ways that do not adequately rethink the relationship between class and culture in the Indian context. While the Rudolphs made a strong argument for multiple conceptions of modernity, their approach to class was shaped by the view that class was not a significant basis for political mobilization in India in contrast to Western Europe.15 As Asha Sarangi has noted, for the Rudolphs, India’s ‘indigenous categories of caste, ethnicity and religion were not in tune with the class conflicts in the same manner as they unfolded in Western Europe’ (2017, 347). India’s distinctive path of modernity was, therefore, marked by this relative lack of political salience of class mobilization. Paradoxically, while the Rudolphs made a political case for Indian exceptionalism, their theoretical project provided a fruitful and necessary foundation for a rethinking of this relationship between class and cultural identity. In the Rudolphs’ language of political economy, this would require rethinking the relationship between class and the ‘politics of region and religion’. We have already seen examples, such

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as their reference to migration, in their own work that illustrate the empirical nature of this relationship. However, the kind of rethinking that is necessary to fully grasp this relationship between class and culture rests on the Rudolphs’ deeper foundational, theoretical, and methodological challenges to the field of political economy. Let us return, for instance, to their explanation of why they prioritize cultural identities in their delineation of the bases of political mobilization. As we have seen, their argument rested on the ways in which cultural identities prove to be ‘more accessible, meaningful, and effective’ than ‘more abstract and less familiar secular ideologies of class, nationalism, or citizenship’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 9). Contemporary political trends in recent years have certainly underlined the significance of this claim. Yet, as we have seen with the rise of Hindu nationalism, this has not meant that nationalism or citizenship has become less salient. The rise of Hindu nationalism has, as a wealth of scholarship has illustrated, challenged, and in many ways changed, the presumed secular terms of nationalism and citizenship (Basu 2015; Jaffrelot 1998). However, while political trends in India have sparked a rethinking of nationalism and citizenship, the study of class has been either rooted in the conventional frames of political economy in social science scholarship or supplanted by the turn towards explanations based on cultural difference in post-colonial approaches to the study of India.16 My reinterpretation of a Rudolphian framework of political economy calls for an interpretative project that both addresses the processes of structural formation that produce class inequality and takes seriously the ways in which the politics of class becomes meaningful in the context of societal particularities and cultural politics in India. This kind of analysis in effect unsettles the Rudolphs’ empirical claim about the marginality of class as a category with political salience in India even as it builds on their underlying conceptual framework. While the Rudolphs’ intervention in political science draws on anthropological work, their conceptual and analytical interventions are also distinct from the kinds of trends that have shaped the interdisciplinary study of culture and politics in fields such as post-colonial studies and cultural anthropology. The Rudolphs specifically sought to provide systemic rather than localized explanations of contemporary Indian politics through their interpretive approach to the study of political economy. It is through this endeavour that they delineated an

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analytical space that rested between the binary oppositions of the universal and the particular and of Western and non-Western contexts. In the case of In Pursuit of Lakshmi, their theoretical project was ultimately not concerned with a reconceptualization of Marxian class theory but with a reconceptualization of liberal democratic theories of pluralism and the state. They were invested in an explanation of centrist trends in Indian politics that had eschewed leftist class politics as well as (as they believed at the time) right-wing exclusionary cultural nationalist movements. They argued, ‘If interests, more than classes, provide the main link between state and society in India, mobilized interests have proved as decisive as organized interests for policy determination and state formation. In the multifaceted political economy of the Indian state, the demand group stands out as both a distinctive and a powerful determinant of the state in its policy mode’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 15). The mobilization of demand groups, in this conception, channelled political mobilization within the framework of a liberal democratic state. Conflicts of interest were handled through interestbased demands and not through the antagonism of class conflict or the fracturing that could stem from religious or caste-based movements. As I have been arguing, such a framing tends to short-change crucial questions that address how mobilized interests are linked to class formation. The Rudolphs identified demand-group mobilization rather than class mobilization as the basis of political claims in India because of their liberal pluralist analytical framing that presumed that class was a less salient political category. Nevertheless, their conceptualization also allowed them to capture some of the distinctive complexities and contradictions of state-societal relationships in India. Their empirical analysis did not evade the strains on India’s democratic state. The Indian state in their conception was emerging as a paradoxical form of ‘weak–strong’ state that not only retained a significant form of autonomy but was also increasingly constrained by both societal demands and the deleterious effects of deinstitutionalization that had begun to take root in the post-Emergency period. While the Rudolphs have proved wrong in some of their more idealized beliefs that such contradictions would be contained by Indian pluralism, their analysis provides an invaluable framework for the political economy of the state that addresses the textured and contradictory nature of Indian society. Indeed, this characterization

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of the ‘weak-strong’ state prefigured later challenges in state theory that sought to question the boundaries between state and society (Migdal 2001; Mitchell 1991). Their framework for an understanding of the relationship between state, society, and political economy can be reworked in ways that develop the much-needed theoretical and methodological space for an understanding of more recent trends in the post-liberalization period in India.

Interpretive Political Economy and the Middle Classes in Post-liberalization India India’s economic reforms that began to accelerate in the 1990s have now produced a wealth of scholarship on the political economy of post-liberalization India. While such work has drawn on a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, the kind of interpretive framework that the Rudolphs set forth provides a rich terrain that can lead to a more adequate understanding of political trends in contemporary India. I illustrate this potential through a rethinking of my scholarship on India’s middle classes in the post-liberalization period through the lens of the Rudolphs’ intellectual project. My arguments about the emergence of the ‘new middle class’ (Fernandes 2006, 2015) sought to examine the social construction of a distinctive identity of the middle classes in the post-liberalization period. In the language of the Rudolphs, this category represented a small but powerful emerging ‘demand group’ that sought to reshape national political discourses and cultural norms, and make political and economic claims on the state. However, the conceptualization of the middle class as a demand group, I would argue, misses the analytical force of the category of class. The middle classes represent a social category that has its own set of interests, identities, and forms of mobilization. While these interests are stratified by the socio-economic differentiation within this social group (as well as by inequalities such as caste and religion), an analytics of class allows us to grasp such interests in ways that are not fully captured by the concept of the demand group (Fernandes 2006).17 Consider then implications of this focus on a situated, culturally specific analytics of class. By focusing on an in-depth analysis of the making of this social group, my research challenged what had become a widely accepted presupposition in scholarship on India’s reforms—that

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such reforms had been a state- and political elite–driven project that occurred ‘by stealth’ (Jenkins 2000), with little public debate. What such presuppositions of India’s early decades of reforms have missed is that political responses to reforms are culturally coded in ways that do not correspond to more formal kinds of knowledge or opinions, either about specific policies or about the question of economic reforms in general. Scholarship on these early years of reforms produced two major sets of findings. First, opinion-based surveys suggested that knowledge about economic reforms in India was relatively low, and that the question of economic reforms had not been a major mass-electoral issue at the time.18 The emerging political science consensus about the early years of reforms in India failed to grasp that perceptions of reforms were being shaped by cultural and social meanings and practices that fell outside the survey codings of formal forms of knowledge.19 Instead, such perceptions were being shaped in highly visible ways by discourses and debates on India’s middle classes. The most visible cultural coding of economic reforms in the 1990s was the emergence of consumption patterns and lifestyles associated with newly available commodities. Contesting shifts in economic policy were unfolding in the space of public culture and involved conflicts over cultural globalization and the emergence of new aesthetic and spatialized identities and lifestyles of specific segments of the urban middle classes. In Geertzian terms, the emerging consumption and lifestyle practices represented the everyday signs and symbols through which people made sense of and gave meaning to the more abstract term ‘economic reforms’. What was missing in the political scientific scholarship on this early phase of reforms was a conceptual space that could recognize what the Rudolphs identified as the language of political economy. Consider again the Rudolphs’ argument that Gandhi and Nehru made competing ‘languages of political economy an important aspect of India’s public discourse’ (1987, 395). The language of political economy that was introduced through reforms in the 1990s was shaped by a public aspirational promise of upward mobility, with a new middle class identity as the highly visible embodiment of this promise (Fernandes 2006). The weight of the contradiction between political scientific assumptions of the stealth of reforms and a presumed low knowledge about economic policies on the one hand and the hypervisibility of this new public language of a liberalizing

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economy on the other can only be understood through the ways in which the field of political economy has increasingly foreclosed the kind of interpretative cultural framework that the Rudolphs deployed in their long intellectual career. This conceptual framework of the languages of political economy is not reducible to post-structuralist conceptions of language and discourse.20 While post-structuralist conceptions of discourse can be analytically useful, the kind of approach I am developing is specifically engaged in an analysis of the links and tensions between language, culture, and socio-economic structure that are necessary for an adequate understanding of systemic patterns of political and socio-economic change in India.21 Consider the implications of such an approach. The significance of the new middle-class language of political economy that fully took root in the 1980s and 1990s does not lie in an erroneous claim that the middle classes were transformed into a homogeneous social group or that the political consequences of the assertion of this social group is predetermined. The aspirational promise of this language can have diverging political implications. Such an aspirational promise can produce support for reforms even if the benefits are delayed. However, the failure of state policies to deliver on such promises can also intensify social and political conflict. The tensions of this aspirational promise can be seen playing out in the current context of Modi’s policies. Modi effectively deployed a conception of what he called a ‘neo–middle class’ identity to both tap into this aspirational promise and to call attention to the ways in which the Congress-led government had failed to deliver on it to a broader swath of the civil society. Modi’s language of development in effect recast the post-liberalization language of political economy through a vision of development that combined the aspirational promise of reforms with a promise of active and enhanced state support (BJP Manifesto 2014; Fernandes 2015). In effect, he combined the post-liberalization language of reforms with older languages of state developmentalism that had long benefitted the middle classes (for instance, through the provision of public sector employment and subsidized higher education). Paying attention to such languages of class illuminates how political leaders can deploy such languages for forms of political mobilization that can be either inclusionary or exclusionary. In this instance, Modi was able to deploy an aspirational middle-class language that invoked the promise of

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inclusion (in contrast to the exclusionary form of Hindutva politics of his political party). The Rudolphs themselves would later delve into the contradictory effects of these post-liberalization languages of political economy on the middle-class structure and identity. Drawing on their in-depth knowledge of Rajasthan, their essay ‘From Landed Class to Middle Class’ provides a nuanced historically situated study of the relationship between land reform, social status, and middle-class formation (2011). They analyse the transformation of Rajputs from a landed class to a middle class through a varied process that is marked by caste and generation. In this later work, they continue to wrestle with the tension and relationship between class and cultural difference where, as they put it, ‘the class languages’ of British colonial modernity ‘jostled against an evolving caste language of social difference’ (2011, 114). They further analyse how these languages of class deepened with the effects of land reform in the early decades of the twentieth century. Their delineation of class as a ‘language’ in this context, once again, combines their focus on language and discourse with a materialist understanding of class formation. For example, they argued that the resulting dispossession of Rajput jagirdars22 ‘who controlled over 60 per cent of the state’s productive land’ (2011, 120) would provide the socio-economic basis for a varied set of Rajput adaptation strategies, which in turn enabled a transition of this social group from a landed to a middle class. One of the central conceptual strengths of the Rudolphs’ analysis of this socio-economic transition lies in the way in which they hold in tension the relationship between dominant languages of class that circulate at various historical moments on the one hand and the differentiated adaptation strategies that are stratified by internal socio-economic differences on the other. For instance, they analyse the varied responses to the Nehruvian conceptions of class embodied in the reforms of the Congress government. They argue that while the big jagirdars adopted the Nehruvian project of class formation by adopting a ‘middle-class outlook’, the less well-off socio-economic strata faced greater struggles in their strategies of adaptation. They argue that what varying generations of Rajputs ‘could choose and become depended not only on the changing context but also on their social origins as large jagirdars, chhote bhaiyen [younger brothers] and small Rajputs’ (2011, 124).

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In this analysis, the Rudolphs provide a complex analysis of the interaction between political–cultural languages of class; stratified socioeconomic structures; and individual, group, and generational strategies of adaptation. Middle-class formation—and the concept of class in this framework—emerges as a nuanced interrelationship between culture, structure, and agency. Their framework departs both from a self-evident economistic analytics of class on the one hand and from recent poststructuralist, post-colonial trends that have used discursive and cultural analysis to displace the analytical import of the structural forces of socio-economic processes on the other (Fernandes 1998, 2017). A defining feature of this framework is the way in which this relationship between the cultural and structural dimensions of class formation does not rest on conventional logics of class analytics in which structure is the presumed precursor or primary determinant of cultural change. Consider, for instance, their argument about the effects of land reforms on middle-class formation. In this situation, a political language of class is the precursor for the socio-economic changes that ensue in the Rajput identity formation. As they put it, the ‘language of class introduced by the States Peoples Freedom Movement in the 1930s and 1940s structured the process of abolition of jagirs in the 1950s’ (1987, 119). The structural effects of the introduction of this language would then, in turn, interact with and produce varied cultural and social processes. This later analysis of class formation both built on and deepened the interpretive model of political economy that the Rudolphs had laid out in In Pursuit of Lakshmi. Their early tendency towards highlighting an opposition between class and cultural difference evolves here into a textured portrait of the mutually constitutive relationship between class formation, social status, and cultural identity.23

Reflections on Liminality: Disciplinarity and the Rudolphs’ Intellectual Location The intellectual challenges that the Rudolphs pose to dominant disciplinary trends in comparative politics and in the study of the politics and political economy of India remain substantial. However, the full import of the potential of the kind of interpretive political economic analysis of contemporary India that the Rudolphs engaged in also requires an understanding of another dimension of the specific

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intellectual location that they occupied. Their interventions were made from a position of intellectual liminality between the disciplinary imperatives of political science as well as the normative trends of South Asian studies in the United States of America. I would like to conclude this chapter by briefly reflecting on how the Rudolphs’ own use of the notion of liminality can provide a productive conceptual space that furthers the study of political economy in India. The nature of this creative liminality, in the spirit of the Rudolphs’ intellectual legacy, unsettles the norms of political science and South Asian studies in the United States of America.24 In Pursuit of Lakshmi, as we have seen, represented a critical challenge in keeping with their battle against the ‘imperialism of categories’ (see Chapter 2 of this volume by Echeverri-Gent and Sadiq) that has taken root in political science. This dominant model has also taken the form of the Rudolphs’ criticisms of the discipline’s methodological imperatives that have devalued area-based and interpretive work.25 For instance, while the disciplines’ mixed methods model often includes interpretive, field-based, or ethnographic research, it usually rests on implicit hierarchies of what kinds of knowledge are scientifically prioritized. In the mixed methods formula, interpretive methods are generally deployed to flesh out, extend, or deepen a research design that is defined by the presumed foundational rigors of quantitative or cross-national comparative methods. As we have seen with the study of Indian political economy, the cumulative weight of such norms produces intellectual foreclosures of particular kinds of empirical and conceptual questions. The Rudolphs actively pushed against this narrow form of disciplinarity through their analysis of the liminality of the historical figure of Amar Singh, a colonial subject in British India who documented his experiences. They understood Amar Singh as a historically situated chronicler of identity formation. As they put it, ‘Amar Singh’s diary conveys discovery, enactment, and interpretation of rules relevant to several cultural contexts. It teaches us about identity formation in a colonial context’ (2003, 682). Making the case for the intellectual import of Amar Singh’s ‘subjective knowledge’ that allowed him to serve as a contemporaneous ethnographer of his times, they argued for the value of a single humanistic narrative representation. In a departure from the disciplinary turn to both comparative and mixed methods

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models, they explicitly criticized the disciplinary practice of ‘treating observation as transparent or unmediated’. They argued: But isn’t a diary a singular representation? Don’t we need many diaries, or at least a sample, before we can treat them as representative of a time and place? How can one person’s diary stand for anything more than a single, perhaps idiosyncratic way of life? The answer lies in the elective affinity of what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “following a rule.” A few well-placed informants make it possible to discern that a rule is being followed. (2003, 681)

Their elaboration focused on the value and necessity of cultural interpretation on its own methodological terms and not as a method that needed to be translated through the dominant social scientific practices of political science. However, from a Rudolphian perspective, a singular focus on the strictures of political science is not sufficient for the kind of interpretive political economy that is necessary for an understanding of contemporary India. Their approach is also distinct from other approaches within South Asian studies. In contrast to political science, interpretive political economy in the terrain of area studies has expanded in the United States of America. There has been a rich and burgeoning scholarship that has drawn on in-depth, often culturally inclined approaches to the study of the state and political economy in India. However, such approaches have increasingly moved away from a focus on the kind of systemic explanations of the political economy of the state that political scientists, including the Rudolphs, have been concerned with. The space for this kind of interpretive approach to the study of the political economy of India has tended to decline within the kind of interdisciplinarity that has become dominant in the US South Asian studies (Fernandes 2017). Consider, for instance, the case of post-liberalization India. If political science scholarship has eschewed the significance of the interpretation of culture for a full understanding of the politics of reform, the study of the systemic relationship between socio-economic processes and cultural identities in South Asian studies has also moved to the background. Interdisciplinary interpretive analyses of political economic processes now tend to presume that nuanced understandings of identity and inequality must rest on a diffused conception of power.26

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This specific type of anthropological and post-colonial turn in the US South Asian studies often tends to conflate systemic or structural explanations of inequality with deterministic models of structuralfunctionalism.27 If dominant political scientific approaches to political economy now too often miss the interpretive significance of cultural analysis, dominant approaches in area studies, in turn, miss the significance of structural analysis. The close reading of In Pursuit of Lakshmi that I have engaged in provides an opportunity to build on the creative liminality of the Rudolphs’ own intellectual location to rethink the study of Indian political economy. Let us return to the Rudolphs’ self-characterization of Lakshmi as speaking a ‘liminal language’ between the universal and the particular (1987, 393). While the Rudolphs sought to foreground culture and interpretation, these concerns were framed by their social scientific concern with the analysis and explanation of systemic patterns of political and economic processes. The Rudolphs, in this endeavour, themselves occupied a liminal space between the dominant disciplinary terrain of political science and the interpretive contextual approaches of South Asian studies. The liminality of the Rudolphs’ intellectual location provides a rich intellectual space that can enrich the study of politics and political economy. For instance, their work can allow for an expansion of a liminal intellectual terrain between political science’s disciplinary strictures of political economy on the one hand and postcolonial, culturalist interpretations of class, state, and the economy in India on the other. In their reading of Amar Singh, the Rudolphs would explain their use of the concept of liminality in the following way: We prefer the term liminal over the related term hybrid to characterize his identity. We see liminal identities as fluid, subject to changing contexts, and hybrid identities as continuous and self-perpetuating. As we use the term, liminality invokes a contingent location on one side or another of a border that separates two forms of life, or a location in the culturally ambiguous no-man’s-land that lies between them. Hybridity differs from liminality by invoking a created but durable and self-perpetuating combination of qualities. We find the term liminality appropriate for navigating the shoals of end-of-the-century cultural expectations characteristic of the imperial era, when cultural bordercrossing was suspect. (1987, 683)

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The institutional cultures of both disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields of knowledge in the United States of America too often produce intellectual territories that make border-crossing more suspect than the academic celebration of interdisciplinarity might imply. Yet, it is precisely the intellectual risks of the creative liminality that the Rudolphs occupied that need to be relived in new ways in order to grapple with the complexities of the cultural, political, and economic processes that are unfolding in contemporary India. *** In Pursuit of Lakshmi remains a vital text for the study of the political economy of the Indian state. The continued significance of this text lies not in its successes or shortcomings in predicting future political and economic trends in India. The Rudolphs themselves had moved well past the empirical claims about the political economy of the Indian state in their subsequent writings. Rather, the work provides a foundational text for a model of interpretative political economy that combines the fine-grained, distinctive methodological rigor of interpretative cultural analysis with political scientific concerns for systemic explanations and understandings of political behaviour and outcomes. Locating the contributions of the Rudolphs’ scholarship in these intellectual genealogies of political science and South Asian studies can provide a productive means for deepening our understanding of recent intellectual, political, and economic trends. This close reading of In Pursuit of Lakshmi has sought to illustrate how long and weighty legacies of their scholarship can provide a means for rejuvenating and transforming the intellectual currencies of the present moment.

Endnotes 1. For an important and nuanced discussion of the links between the developmental state and the post-liberalization regulatory state, see Morgan and Dubash (2013). 2. The Rudolphs themselves addressed such changes in their later work (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001a, 2001b, 2011). 3. The Rudolphs’ conceptualization of the state also changed in later years. For an analysis of their later writings on the state, see Sarangi (2017).

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4. For an overview of such emerging methodological trends, see King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) and Brady and Collier (2010). 5. For a critical discussion of reified conceptions of the ‘economy’, see Mitchell (2002). 6. My focus in this chapter is specifically on the field of political economy and conceptualizations of socio-economic class. For a broad overview of the question of culture in political science, see Wedeen (2002). For work that has addressed questions of identity in a discussion of India’s political economy, see Varshney (1998). 7. For an early exposition of the constructed nature of social categories, see Hall (1992). The post-colonial turn of the subaltern studies school developed a social constructivist approach through a critical rethinking of Western conceptions of categories such as ‘class’ and ‘nation’ (Chakrabarty 1989; Chatterji 1986). For an overview work in political science, see Adler (2001) and Finnemore and Sikkink (2001). 8. See, for example, Jenkins (2000), Kohli (2004), and Sinha (2005). Such scholarship has tended to emphasize in-depth research taking India as a single case (while in many instances adapting a comparative method to cross state comparisons within) and has usually drawn on mixed methods with a strong fieldwork-based component. For other work in comparative politics that has departed from dominant norms, see Aronoff (1993) and Wedeen (1999, 2008). 9. I will turn later in the chapter to the ways in which recent trends of South Asian studies have missed the significance of the contributions of the kind of interpretive political science scholarship that the Rudolphs developed. 10. However, note that they also drew on a range of theoretical approaches including those that built on Weber and Wittgenstein. 11. My approach thus departs from Agarwala and Herring’s (Chapter 6) conception of class and argues that an adequate analysis of class necessitates addressing the cultural dimensions of class formation, identity, and structure. This is also the case when it comes to class categories such as the middle class, which cannot be adequately grasped by Marxian or economistic conceptions of class or labor. 12. Early landmark texts include Bardhan (1999) and Herring (1983). Work has sought to address the historical relationship between class and the state (Kohli 2004; Chibber 2006). For work on poverty in India, see Echeverri-Gent (1993) and Kohli (2012). Recent scholarship in political science has focused more on how to produce more effective economic reforms or on how state failures and inadequacies pose obstacles to reforms (Chandra 2015; Jenkins 2000). This is in contrast to scholarly work in sociology which has addressed questions of inequality in more depth (Heller 2000; Agarwala 2013). For a broader critical discussion of the absence of class analysis in India, see Agarwala and Herring (2008). For exceptions in political science, see Fernandes (2006) and Kohli (2012).

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13. In Pursuit of Lakshmi was clearly attuned to both the discursive and structural dimensions of political economy well before a particular version of post-colonial theory had fully taken root within South Asian Studies. 14. As I will note later, similar trends shape middle-class politics. 15. In other words, India, like the United States of America, was an example of exceptionalism because it deviated from the Western-European model of class-based labour parties. 16. See, for example, Chakrabarty’s rethinking of working-class history. Chakrabarty argues that working-class consciousness was foreclosed by questions of culture. He roots his explanation in the juxtaposition between ‘notion of a pre-capitalist “community”—distinguished by hierarchical, inegalitarian, and illiberal relationships—and the notion of individualism that has been with us since the rise of the bourgeois order in Europe, entailing ideas of citizenship, equal rights, equality before the law’ (1989, 219). 17. In this regard, while Herring and Agarwala’s (2008) focus on class and labour does not capture the complexities of a group such as the middle class, their emphasis on retaining a focus on class as a central theoretical and empirical category is in line with my argument here. 18. Chhibber and Eldersveld’s survey (2000) indicated that 15 per cent of masses and 63 per cent of elites in India were knowledgeable about reforms in India, in contrast to 77 per cent and 100 per cent respectively in China. Sanjay Kumar (2004) used NES data to show that by 1998, 26 per cent of all social groups had heard about economic reforms. However, Kumar noted that despite negative perceptions of reform, this did not serve as an important electoral issue. 19. For an analysis of the survey research methodology and the ‘don’t know’ responses as a reflection of socio-economic inequality and the corresponding conditions of knowledge, see Bourdieu (1984, 398–9). 20. For post-structuralist approaches to class, see Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolf (2000). 21. This parallels the Rudolphs’ approach in Lakshmi … that held in productive tension, an attention to language, culture, socio-economic structure, and systemic explanations of Indian politics. 22. Feudal aristocrats who collected revenue and provided local government. 23. The text of their essay is replete with rich examples. For instance, they note that more privileged segments were able to move from the landed class to the middle class of educated professionals in service-related occupations. For less privileged Rajputs, as they note ‘ideas of honor’ prevented them from taking up ‘menial jobs in urban commercial settings’ (125). In more recent years, some segments they illustrate have tried to produce a hybrid Rajput identity combining narratives of cultural heritage and middle class formation in ways that take advantage of the tourism industry.

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24. My analysis of these trends draws on my previous commentary (Fernandes 2017). 25. For a useful discussion of these trends for Asian Studies and Asian American Studies, see commentaries in Verge (special issue on Political Science and Asian and Asian American Studies) Vol. 3, no. 1, 2017. 26. A comprehensive discussion of South Asian Studies is beyond the scope of this chapter. See my discussion elsewhere (Fernandes 2017; Fernandes, nd). 27. My point here is not that individual studies in such a vein are not useful or insightful or that such studies do not exist. Rather, I am addressing the impact of the disciplining of area studies in the United States of America. See, for example, the legacies of the post-colonial model of the subaltern studies school as well as a broad anthropological discourse that has overlooked or rejected the structural dimensions of class analysis. On the middle classes, see Mazzarella (2003) and Rajagopal (2001). For a more recent example of work that has sought to provide an interpretive framework of economic and cultural transitions in ways that produce systemic explanations of Indian politics, see Corbridge and Harriss (2000).

References Adler, E. 2001. ‘Constructivism and International Relations’. In Handbook of International Relations, edited by W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse, and B.A. Simmons, 95–118. London: Sage. Agarwala, Rina. 2013. Informal Labor, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agarwala, Rina, and Ron Herring. 2008. Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from South Asia. New York: Lexington Books. Aronoff, Michael. 1993. Power and Ritual in the Israeli Labour Party: A Study in Political Anthropology. New York: Routledge. Bardhan, Pranab. 1999. The Political Economy of Development in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Basu, Amrita. 2015. Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brady, Henry, and David Collier, eds. 2010. Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. 1994. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chandra, Kanchan. 2015. ‘The New Indian State’. Economic and Political Weekly 50 (41) (10 October): 46–58.

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Chatterji, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed Books. Chhibber, Pradeep, and Samuel Eldersveld. 2000. ‘Local Elites and Popular Support for Economic Reform in India and China’. Comparative Political Studies 33 (3): 350–73. Chibber, Vivek. 2006. Locked in Place: State Building and Late Industrialization in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Corbridge, Stuart, and John Harriss. 2000. Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy. New York: Polity. Dubash, Navroz K., and Bronwen Morgan, eds. 2012. The Rise of the Regulatory State in the South: Infrastructure and Development in Emerging Economies. New York: Oxford University Press.. Echeverri-Gent, John. 1993. The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fernandes, Leela. 1997. Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1998. ‘Culture, Structure and Working Class Politics’. Economic and Political Weekly 23 (52): 53–60. ———. 2006. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2015. ‘India’s Middle Classes in Contemporary India’. In Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India, edited by Knut Axel Jacobsen, 232–42. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. ‘Disciplinary Quandaries: A Metacommentary on the Relationship Between Political Science and the Interdisciplinary Study of Asia’. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3 (1): 20–5. ———. nd. ‘Rethinking the “Dominant Proprietary Classes”: India’s Middle Classes and the Reproduction of Inequality’. In The Political Economy of Development in India: Revisited, edited by Elizabeth Chatterjee and Matthew McCartney. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. 2001. ‘Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics’. Annual Review of Political Science 4: 391–416. Gibson-Graham, J.K., S. Resnick, and R. Wolff, eds. 2000. Class and Its Others. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1977. The Interpretation of Cultures. NY: Basic Books. Hall, Stuart. 1992. ‘What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’ In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gena Dent, 21–33. Seattle, WA: Bay View Press. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2001. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Heller, Patrick. 2000. The labour of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Herring, Ronald. 1983. Land to the Tiller: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Herring, Ronald, and Rina Agarwala, eds. 2008. Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from a Subcontinent. London/New Delhi: Routledge/Daanish. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1998. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Jenkins, Rob. 2000. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kale, Sunila. 2014. Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development. Stanford: Stanford University Press. King, Gary, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kohli, Atul. 2004. State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kumar, Sanjay. 2004. ‘Impact of Economic Reforms on Indian Electorate’. Economic and Political Weekly 39 (16) (17 April): 1621–30. Mazzarella, William. 2003. Shovelling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Migdal, Joel. 2001. State in Society: How States and Societies Transform and Constitute Each Other. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’. American Political Science Review 85 (1): 77–96. ———. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rajagopal, Arvind. 2001. ‘Thinking about the New Middle Class: Gender, Advertising and Politics in an Age of Globalisation’. In Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-Independence India, edited by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, 57–99. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Roediger, David. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso. Rudolph, Lloyd, and Susanne Rudolph. 1967. The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001a. ‘The Iconization of Chandrababu: Sharing Sovereignty in India’s Federal Market Economy’. Economic and Political Weekly 36 (18) (5 May): 1541–51.

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———. 2001b. ‘Redoing the Constitutional Design: From and Interventionist to a Regulatory State’. In The Success of India’s Democracy, edited by Atul Kohli, 127–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. ‘Engaging Subjective Knowledge: How Amar Singh’s Diary Narratives of and by the Self Explain Identity Formation’. Perspectives on Politics 1 (4): 681–94. ———. 2011. ‘From Landed Class to Middle Class: Rajput Adaptation in Rajasthan’. In Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, 108–39. New Delhi: Routledge. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sarangi, Asha. 2017. ‘State Formation and Political Economy of India: The Rudolphian Paradigm’. India Review 16 (3): 344–56. Scott, James. 1987. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sewell, William. 1980. Work and Revolution in France: The Language of labour from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinha, Aseema. 2005. The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Stedman Jones, Gareth. 1983. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E.P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books. Varshney, Ashutosh. 1998. Democracy, Development and the Countryside: UrbanRural Struggles in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wedeen, Lisa. 1999. Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002. ‘Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science’. American Political Science Review 96 (4): 713–28. ———. 2008. Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

8

From Gandhi to Modi Enlisting the Rudolphs to Understand Charismatic Leadership1

amrita basu

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ndia’s prime minister Narendra Modi is in most ways the antithesis of India’s ‘founding father’, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Whereas Gandhi identified with women, Modi embodies masculinity. Whereas Modi has exonerated and sometimes provoked anti-minority violence, Gandhi abhorred violence against Muslims and undertook numerous fasts to prevent or stop it. Whereas Modi is a Hindu nationalist, Gandhi respected people of all religious faiths. Whereas Modi has strengthened the executive and weakened autonomous civil society associations, Gandhi opposed centralized state power and favoured direct democracy. Whereas Modi embraces neoliberalism and globalization, Gandhi rejected industrialization and favoured a village-based economy. And yet there are some striking similarities in the ways Gandhi and Modi appeal to an ascetic Hindu tradition that repudiates conventional electoral politics in favour of more direct forms of democracy. Modi has positioned himself in relation to Gandhi in complicated and contradictory ways. Although many of Modi’s views and actions would have been anathema to Gandhi, Modi has implied that he is sustaining Gandhi’s legacy through acts of service, sacrifice, and religious devotion. Has Modi become one of India’s most powerful postIndependence leaders because of his repudiation of Gandhian ideals or because of his selective appropriation and reinterpretation of Gandhi’s

Amrita Basu, From Gandhi to Modi: Enlisting the Rudolphs to Understand Charismatic Leadership. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190125011.003.0008

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legacy? What does Modi’s invocation of Gandhi tell us about the sources of Modi’s charismatic appeal? Comparing Modi, one of India’s most powerful post-Independence leaders, and Gandhi, India’s most powerful pre-Independence leader, enables us to explore the temporal influences on charismatic leaders. As the Rudolphs argue, Gandhi’s leadership of the freedom struggle resulted in part from the social and psychological costs of colonialism. Modi gives expression to deep-seated resentments against elites who possess wealth, education, and social connections (Gupta 2019). Modi’s ascent reflects both the success of democracy in generating aspirations for a more level playing field and popular disenchantment with the failures of democracy to dismantle hereditary social and political power. Relatedly, charting the distance from Gandhi to Modi is the story of changing perceptions of the Congress Party—from a powerful social movement organization to what is seen as the fiefdom of the Nehru–Gandhi family. That Modi gives expression to xenophobia and Islamophobia results from both his own commitments and certain facets of the national and global political environment. Most observers would agree that Gandhi exemplified charismatic leadership but some would object to considering Modi a charismatic leader. To begin with, Modi is neither ethical nor a visionary. The extent to which Modi has been a catalyst for radical transformation is questionable. Modi’s claims to be challenging established elites and empowering ordinary people are not substantiated by his actions. Moreover, Modi’s success is so dependent on a combination of RSS support, mediatization, and extraordinary funding of his election campaigns that it is difficult to fully differentiate his personal attributes from brand Modi. While recognizing these objections, I would argue that there is analytic value to depicting Modi as charismatic. If Modi’s views are deeply objectionable, so are those of other charismatic leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini. Although Modi’s leadership has not been a catalyst for social transformation—indeed in some ways it reaffirms the status quo—it marks a radical departure from earlier generations of post-Independence leaders. The contrasts between the India Nehru envisioned—as secular, pluralist, and social democratic—and Modi envisions—as Hindu nationalist—are especially striking. The financial and organizational resources Modi has availed of may enhance his charismatic appeal but do not explain it.

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The Rudolphs’ path-breaking scholarship on leadership, political psychology, and democracy is invaluable in comparing Gandhi and Modi. The first section of this chapter extrapolates from the Rudolphs’ many writings their major arguments about the sources of Gandhi’s charisma. I argue in the section that follows that the Rudolphs’ claim that Gandhi had a lasting impact on Indian politics underestimates the strength of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent body of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The RSS provided an opposing and influential interpretation to that of Gandhi about the role of individual leadership, the relationship between tradition and modernity, and the impact of British colonialism on India. The third section asks whether Modi displays what the Rudolphs consider the attributes of charismatic leadership and analyses how and why Modi both upholds and denigrates Gandhi. The fourth section explores Gandhi and Modi with respect to their different conceptions of democracy and populism. I suggest that Modi’s simultaneous repudiation and affirmation of Gandhi is related to his populist turn, which critiques liberal democracy while promising to create a more democratic order. The fifth and concluding section critically assesses the Rudolphs’ analysis of charismatic leadership.

The Rudolphs’ Gandhi The Rudolphs’ scholarship on Gandhi dates back to the 1950s, a time when Gandhi’s leadership of the anti-colonial nationalist movement was considered exemplary, but before he was taken seriously as a theorist. The Rudolphs identify the influence on Gandhi of both his rootedness in Hindu, Gujarati traditions, and his cosmopolitanism. They describe the reciprocal influence of Gandhi on Western theorists and their influence on him. In their more recent work they argue that to describe Gandhi as a nationalist is to understate his transcendent humanistic values. One of the Rudolphs’ most important contributions is their critique of the ‘unself-conscious parochialism of categories’ found in modernization theory, which assumes that tradition and modernity are homogenous, water tight categories, and that progress occurs in a linear fashion with modernity inexorably supplanting tradition. The Rudolphs’ seminal book The Modernity of Tradition (1967) argues that

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social change in India resulted from the adaptation rather than eradication of tradition. In this context, they contest the notion that Gandhi was either modern or traditional; they demonstrate how he employed tradition to achieve modern political goals while questioning the value of modernity. In other writings, the Rudolphs critique the common tendency to consider ethnic conflict and religious fundamentalism traditional forces. In their essay ‘Modern Hate: How Ancient Animosities Get Invented’, they argue, ‘Ancient hatreds are thus made as much as they are inherited. To call them ancient is to pretend they are primordial forces, outside of history and human agency, when often they are merely synthetic antiques’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1993, 24–9). Challenging the rationalist approaches and quantitative methods that dominated the discipline of political science, the Rudolphs deeply engaged with subjective, first person writings, initially in their Gandhi oeuvre and then in Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary: A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India, which analyses the diaries of a Rajput nobleman over a 40-year period, from 1898 to 1942. They write about the insights we gain from subjective knowledge about identity and category formation and its relevance to political science. The autobiography, then, must be read with a particularly sensitive ear, one that hears what he has to say about his diet, or his relations to his wife, and considers what it might mean for his political style and for how that style might be received. To relegate these remarks to the category of personal frills and curiosities that constitute gossip rather than the serious significance of a great man is to miss what was central to his leadership. (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 185)

The Rudolphs’ understanding of Gandhi’s leadership was deeply influenced by Max Weber. They describe Gandhi as evoking responses that exceeded the routines of everyday life and could be described as magical (Rudolph and Rudolph 1983a, 45; 1983b, 200). In one of Weber’s most widely cited sentences, he claims that charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader. (Weber 1947, 358–9)

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For Weber, charisma is not simply or primarily a quality of leaders but also lies in the bond between leaders and followers as a result of followers’ expectations and leaders’ abilities to meet them. He writes, ‘What alone is important is how the individual is actually regarded by those subject to charismatic authority’ (Rudolph 1963). Consistent with this emphasis on the leader–follower dyad, the Rudolphs describe the relationship between Gandhi and his followers as one of selffulfilling prophecy and mutual expectation and recognition. In one of Susanne Rudolph’s early writings on Gandhi, she elaborates on Weber’s description of charisma as inhering in the relationship between leaders and followers. In a curious way, the psychological chemistry of that relationship between the public man and his constituents is such that in consequence of these beliefs the believers may—if everything else is reasonably favorable—turn out to be right. Followers may, in response to such a leader, be able to mobilize resources within themselves that they cannot and do not ordinarily summon forth, thus justifying the faith that caused them to rise to the occasion in the first place. (Rudolph 1965–6)

The Rudolphs also share Weber’s belief that charismatic leadership often emerges under conditions of extreme social stress or crisis. Elaborating on this interpretation, Robert Tucker argues that a key determinant of a charismatic response is situational: a state of acute distress predisposes people to provide unconditional support for a leader they perceive as extraordinarily qualified (Tucker 1968, 731–56). The implication is that charismatic leadership is in part born of specific circumstances. Four important arguments about the sources of Gandhi’s charisma can be distilled from the Rudolphs’ numerous writings on the subject. The first concerns what they term Gandhi’s moral authority or moral agency. In Chapter 4 of this volume, Kristen Monroe employs the related term ‘moral imagination’ to describe Gandhi’s psychological insight, empathy, and ability to form affective bonds with others and to thereby appeal to the conscience of both his followers and the colonial state. Second, Gandhi was inspired by traditions that the colonizers debased and deployed these traditions in the struggle for freedom. This is especially evident in his understanding of religion. Third, Gandhi provided an effective response to the social and psychological wounds inflicted by colonialism by embodying the very attributes that

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the British denigrated in Indians. Fourth, Gandhi bridged the chasm between public and private domains by identifying the necessity for change to begin internally—within the individual and the domains of family, community, and faith rather than in the formal political sphere. On the first point, Gandhi did not simply appreciate his own agency but also recognized the agency of his followers. To have elevated himself above others would have prevented people from seeing their own potential strength. The Rudolphs describe Gandhi as facing a ‘darshan dilemma’. While he felt graced by peoples’ belief that they could profit spiritually from his presence, he feared that the aura of sanctity (darshan) would impede his work. He responded to this dilemma by emphasizing his ordinariness. Gandhi appreciated the importance of speaking to people’s emotions by candidly exploring his own. The Rudolphs suggest that Gandhi was unusually insightful about what he considered his own frailties, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. His openness in describing them, his recognition that others shared them, and his confidence that he could turn his weaknesses into strengths, enabled him to form affective bonds with others. Gandhi expressed pride in his own identity through his everyday actions. He wore khadi as a leveling force and promoted multi-lingualism in speaking and writing to break the hegemony of Hindi over Urdu and English over Indian languages. By affirming the way most people lived, dressed, and spoke, Gandhi established affective bonds with them and inspired their activism. The second source of Gandhi’s charisma, the Rudolphs argue, was his creative reinterpretation of tradition, particularly religion. For Weber, inner-worldly asceticism, that drew on Protestantism in a way that he thought was unimaginable in Hinduism, promoted the emergence of modernity. By contrast, Gandhi practiced what the Rudolphs term ‘this worldly asceticism’ by drawing on Vaishnavite and Jain traditions. Gandhi subverted the colonial view of religion as the source of backwardness and identified a religious basis for tolerance and inclusion. The Rudolphs attribute Gandhi’s organizational skills and financial acumen to his early exposure to Gujarati merchant traditions. And yet if these skills made Gandhi a savvy political leader, they also fortified his identity as a religious leader; the two were complementary (Tucker 1968, 749). What religion meant to Gandhi is a complex matter. He was driven by a sense of religious duty and considered religion the source of a

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universal morality. The Rudolphs argue that Gandhi’s outlook was shaped not by Brahmanical Hinduism but by the Bhakti tradition, which was critical of social hierarchies and appealed to democratic values among subaltern groups. The fact that Gandhi was not governed by orthodoxy or orthopraxy was key to his charismatic leadership. The Rudolphs chart Gandhi’s trajectory from respecting Hinduism because it tolerated diverse faiths (the view of Hindu nationalists) to advocating equal respect for all religions. Thus, Gandhi never called for the reform of religions other than his own (Mehta, unpublished). Although Gandhi fiercely opposed British colonialism, this did not prevent him from admiring Christianity. He was especially drawn to Jesus Christ’s compassion for the poor and suffering. He once remarked that people often thought he was actually a Christian because he frequently recited the Gospel (Gandhi 2015, 139). Gandhi reportedly asked an American visitor to his ashram to sing the hymn: ‘Where were you when they crucified my Lord?’ This sense of spiritual universalism was key to Gandhi’s ability to transcend sectarian divisions (Gupta 2018). The third element of Gandhi’s charismatic appeal that the Rudolphs identify was his focus on the psychological and social wounds inflicted by colonialism. They write, ‘Gandhi had a unique sensibility both for the nightmare fears of the Indian psyche and for its commonplace daytime self-doubts’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1983a, 7). They suggest that Gandhi was afflicted by the same questions of strength, weakness, and cultural integrity that afflicted the nation as a whole. Gandhi rejected the British association of leadership with masculinity and cultivated feminine qualities such as nurturing and sacrifice. Similarly, his decision to become a vegetarian constituted a form of resistance to British stereotypes linking masculinity and meat-eating and provided a means of restoring Indians’ self-esteem. Gandhi thus fashioned an identity and a message that spoke to the problems and conditions of Indians living under foreign domination (Rudolph and Rudolph 1983b, 159). Fourth, by living his private life in public, Gandhi challenged the liberal public–private divide and demonstrated the public consequences of private morality (Rudolph and Rudolph 1983a, 40). His modest life style, modelled on that of the rural poor, placed the villager at the centre of political imagination and strategy (Rudolph and Rudolph 2013, 34–53). Gandhi’s insistence on performing manual labour, including tasks that upper-caste Hindus consider polluting,

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exemplified his opposition to untouchability. In maintaining a disciplined daily regimen he demonstrated the value of internal over external controls to overcome anger and aggression (Rudolph and Rudolph 1983a, 43). Indeed, the less he could control violence in the public sphere, the more he sought to master his own desires (Rudolph and Rudolph 1983a, 43). Gandhi’s assumption of responsibility for the ills of the larger world elevated his own stature and held people to a higher standard (Rudolph and Rudolph 1983a, 42). Reading the Rudolphs on Gandhi from the perspective of Modi’s ascent raises two questions. First, although the Rudolphs avoid providing a normative assessment of Gandhi, they tether Gandhi’s charismatic leadership to his ethical qualities. Modi demonstrates that charismatic leaders can appear to have divine or exceptional powers that enable them to forge affective bonds with their followers while lacking moral responsibility. I return to this question later in the chapter. Second, the Rudolphs write that Gandhi’s view of religion as a source of morality and as ‘constitutive of social life and of standards in politics survived the fires of partition’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2013, 47). In the section that follows, I question the Rudolphs’ contention that Gandhi settled deep divisions among Indian nationalists over the place of religion in politics.

The RSS The Rudolphs’ arguments about charismatic leadership help explain the strengths of Modi and the RSS, although the Rudolphs do not devote much attention to Gandhi’s Hindu nationalist opponents. Ashis Nandy points out that Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, was the third Hindu nationalist who made attempts on Gandhi’s life (Nandy 2007). Like many of his associates, Godse was outraged that Gandhi challenged their core beliefs and values and upper-caste Hindu domination. This challenge was all the more significant because Gandhi’s practices both paralleled and departed from theirs. In this respect Hindu nationalism constituted the ‘ghostly double’ of Indian nationalism (Wakankar 1995). To understand how, let us return to the three dimensions of Gandhi’s charisma that the Rudolphs identify. On the first, the RSS, like Gandhi, sought to cultivate moral authority by promoting asceticism. It was keenly aware of the importance of initiating change corporeally, psychologically, and culturally, and in the private rather than public

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domain. While engaging in oratory and propaganda, it also appreciated the importance of affective, performative communication. Thus, the RSS created akharas (gymnasiums) to cultivate people’s physical strength and sense of discipline and shakhas (training camps) that promote somatic nationalism (Alter 1994). On the Rudolphs’ second point, there are some similarities between the RSS and Gandhi with respect to the value they place on tradition and their critique of modernity. The RSS exalts religion and engages in asceticism, service, and sacrifice. Like Gandhi, the RSS appreciates the plasticity of tradition and selectively reinterprets Hinduism. This was most evident during the Hindu nationalist campaign since the late 1980s to build a temple dedicated to the deity Ram in Ayodhya. While claiming to subscribe to an orthodox understanding of Hinduism, the RSS and its affiliates refashion Hinduism along Judaeo-Christian lines by elevating the status of Ram, one of many Hindu deities, treating temples as the major site of worship, and claiming that Hindus have a single holy book. Both the RSS and Gandhi interpret religion in a purposeful manner in line with their broader goals. Where they differ is not in the value they ascribe to religion but in how they interpret Hinduism and compare it with other faiths (in the case of the RSS, unlike Gandhi, claiming that Hinduism is superior to other religions). On the third point, both Gandhi and the RSS respond to historical wounds, but their historical references differ. The RSS blames the Mughal Empire (from the mid-sixteenth to early eighteenth century) for the downfall of what they see as the golden era of Hindu rule and also blames post-Independence leaders for ‘appeasing’ Muslims. By contrast, Gandhi is more concerned with the cultural and psychological costs of British colonial domination. This difference played a key role in the failure of the RSS to rival Gandhi’s leadership. With respect to the fourth point, there are significant differences in the way the RSS and Gandhi conceptualize the private domain and its relationship to the public sphere. For Gandhi, all change begins within the self, which is complex and unfathomable in the absence of rigorous self-examination. His moral imagination lies in his belief that people can change the outer world once they master their own desires. By contrast, the RSS places greater value on the community than on the individual. Its devaluation of the individual is consistent with its denigration of the role of leaders, with the important exception

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of Modi whom it has steadfastly supported. However, Modi’s conception of the self is quite different from that of Gandhi. Unlike Gandhi, Modi never reveals his inner thoughts or invites public scrutiny of his actions. Furthermore, whereas for Gandhi the community was inclusive and his ashrams were opened to people of all faiths, the RSS defines the community in religious terms and participation in akharas and shakhas is confined to Hindus. The RSS and Gandhi hated each other and this antipathy became most acute in 1947, amidst the Partition of the subcontinent. Whereas the RSS viewed Indian Muslims as second-class citizens, Gandhi insisted that members of all faiths should be considered equal in India. He went on peace marches and fasts to protect the rights of the tens of millions of Muslims who remained in India. Gandhi profoundly distrusted and opposed the RSS. In 1947, he declined its request to support a ban on cow slaughter, stating that India did not belong to Hindus and to ban cow slaughter would be coercive towards Muslims, Christians, and other groups. Ten days before he was killed, a man named Madanlal Pahwa made an attempt on Gandhi’s life. Gandhi suspected that the RSS was behind it (Noorani 2016). In the decades after Independence, the stance of the RSS and the BJP towards Gandhi has been contradictory. At times they have expressed reverence for Gandhi and claimed fidelity to his values without acknowledging his opposition to their views. In the 1980s the BJP even adopted ‘Gandhian socialism’ as its official party ideology. However, the RSS and the BJP have interspersed reverence with hatred towards Gandhi. BJP candidate Pragya Singh Thakur, who was elected to the Parliament in 2019, delivered fiery campaign speeches in which she hailed Nathuram Godse a patriot.2 Modi has evoked Gandhi respectfully while appropriating Gandhi’s message in keeping with his own objectives.

Modi’s Charisma What are the sources of Modi’s popularity and charisma? Does he display exceptional, superhuman powers that set him apart from ordinary people and inspire them to do things that would otherwise have been unimaginable, as the Rudolphs believe Gandhi did? And if so, how has he achieved this feat? What kind of ‘psychological chemistry’ does

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Modi have with his followers? What personal qualities and abilities enable him to forge affective ties with them? How has he interpreted and employed religious appeals? Does he appear to address social and psychological wounds, and if so, what is the source of these wounds? Before delving into these questions, a brief biographical sketch may be helpful. Narendra Modi entered politics through the RSS. He became a pracharak (full time RSS volunteer) in 1967 and steadily ascended within the organization. In 1987 the RSS deputed Modi to the BJP. He demonstrated skills both as a political strategist for the BJP in the 1995 and 1998 Gujarat Legislative Assembly elections and as a movement organizer (for example, he directed Advani’s ‘rath yatra’ from Somnath to Ayodhya in 1990 and Murli Manohar Joshi’s ‘ekta yatra’ in 1992). The BJP made him its national secretary in 1995 and general secretary in 1998. Starting in 2001, Modi contested and won the Gujarat Assembly elections and served as chief minister of Gujarat for three consecutive terms. With RSS backing, Modi marginalized other high-ranking BJP leaders and ruled Gujarat with an iron fist. While suppressing opposition both from within and outside the BJP, he forged close ties with RSS civil society networks. Modi’s Hindu nationalist commitments were evident throughout the period but especially in 2002 in Gujarat. Under his watch, Hindu nationalist organizations and BJP leaders, ministers and Members of the Legislative Assembly condoned and orchestrated the murder of at least 1,000 Muslims. Although the Supreme Court did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute Modi, there is ample evidence of his responsibility for the violence. In its aftermath, Modi defended the killings and refused to acknowledge the state government’s complicity in the violence. By the time Modi contested the 2014 parliamentary elections, he had completely refashioned his image, thanks in part to the assistance of major media and advertising firms. The ‘new Modi’ is efficient, incorruptible, humble, powerful, and inspiring. He identifies with the suffering and struggles of the common people and promises them jobs, development, and growth. This does not mean that Modi has relinquished his authoritarian tendencies or his Hindu nationalist commitments. He has failed to condemn multiple Hindu nationalist attacks on Christian churches, congregations, nuns, and priests, that are fueled by baseless charges that they are engaging in conversions, and the lynching of Dalits

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and Muslims who are (often falsely) accused of consuming beef. His silent acquiescence has contributed to persistent anti-minority violence. Nonetheless, Modi’s rebranding has been highly successful. In response to a post-poll survey in 2014, one in four respondents said they voted for the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government because Modi was the prime ministerial candidate. According to a Pew Research Center survey in 2017, Modi remains highly popular (Stokes et  al. 2017). Nearly nine in ten Indians hold a favourable opinion of Modi, comparable to their view of him in 2015, a year after he took office. Roughly seven in ten report that they have a very favourable view of the prime minister, again similar to public views in 2015. The survey shows that Modi remains by far the most popular national figure in Indian politics. By the time the 2019 elections approached, Modi remained unusually popular, despite his failure to achieve most of his earlier campaign promises. A February 2019 poll indicates that Modi was the top choice of candidate for prime minister for 83 per cent of 2,000 respondents.3 Modi is best understood as a charismatic populist leader, unlike many populist leaders who are powerful and popular but not necessarily charismatic. The populist leader does not simply represent ‘the people’, Benjamin Moffitt writes, but is actually thought to embody the people (Moffitt 2017). Thus, he argues that populism should not just be understood as a set of ideas or a way of organizing followers but as a performance in which populist leaders present themselves as strong, virile, and healthy in order to present ‘the people’ as strong and unified. Moffitt emphasizes that populist leaders depict themselves as both ordinary and extraordinary and show that they are both of the people and beyond the people. Other attributes of populist leadership include: their identification with the common person; depicting themselves as outsiders to the political system, although they are generally not complete outsiders; opposing established elites; making emotional appeals; identifying with the majority; opposing pluralism and minority rights; and expressing disdain for representative institutions. Modi’s charismatic populist leadership style is closely tethered to his majoritarian nationalism. His tenure in office (2014–present) has emboldened him to become more overtly religious and nationalist. In contrast to the 2014 election campaign, in which he emphasized economic issues, his 2019 election campaign was xenophobic and antiminority. He repeatedly provoked fears about illegal migration and

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threats to national security by terrorist groups in Pakistan. He chose to contest the elections from Varanasi, one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. He concluded his campaign by donning saffron robes and meditating in a cave. In his first speech after the election, he applauded voters for filling his fakir’s jholi (ascetic’s bag), depicted himself as a Hindu ascetic, and enunciated principles drawn from the Hindu religious text, the Bhagvad Gita. The charismatic leadership qualities of both Gandhi and Modi reflect a synergy between their own sensibilities and beliefs and the context of their times. Gandhi’s genius was to encourage Indians to see colonialism as the source of their cultural and psychological injuries. Modi’s genius is to capture and exacerbate dissatisfaction with established elites and particularly with the Congress Party. There was enormous frustration with the ruling Congress party’s dynastic politics that prevented the emergence of new leadership. In the years preceding the 2014 elections, growth rates declined, unemployment and inflation—particularly of food prices—rose, and several public corruption scandals came to light. Many people who voted for the BJP in 2014 were angry at having to pay bribes for basic goods and services while major public officials escaped punishment for engaging in serious public corruption. Other sources of discontent included the government’s failure to create new jobs, India’s crumbling infrastructure, and inadequate electricity supplies. By the 2019 elections, Modi heightened and captured public anxieties about Pakistani aggression, terrorism, and the English-speaking elite. The Rudolphs’ scholarship describes some attributes of Gandhi’s leadership that are surprisingly germane in understanding Modi. Their emphasis on the psychological, social and cultural underpinnings of Gandhi’s appeals hold true for Modi. Like Gandhi, Modi displays a sense of what the Rudolphs describe as the nightmare fears and daytime self-doubts of the Indian psyche. Like Gandhi, Modi appreciates the importance of speaking to people’s emotions and daily life experiences rather than appealing to reason and ideological abstractions. Like Gandhi, Modi engages in political theater and uses clothing and language performatively. Modi does not simply seek to represent the people but rather to embody them through a performance of self and display of emotions that appeal to popular anxieties and aspirations. Like Gandhi, Modi upholds tradition and questions certain features of modernity. Like Gandhi, Modi describes himself as a simple, ordinary

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person who is willing to take extraordinary risks because he claims not to be seeking self-aggrandizement but rather the well-being of the common person. However, unlike Gandhi, Modi actively invites adulation. To a greater extent than Gandhi, Modi embodies incongruous identities. This is partly because of his contradictory stance on democracy, neo liberalism, and globalization. Modi describes himself as a committed democrat but doesn’t value democratic contestation, deliberation, and dissent. He presents himself as a proponent of not only swadeshi (producing goods in India rather than importing them) but also of neoliberalism. He upholds traditional values but also seeks Western acclamation, investment, and allies. Far from being perceived as weaknesses, these contradictions and inconsistencies enhance Modi’s affective ties to multiple constituencies. Let us delve deeper into Modi’s self-presentation. Modi presents himself as a man of humble origins, from a poor, lower (Other Backward Class) background. During his 2014 election campaign, he capitalized on a Congress Party leader’s derisive description of him as a son of a tea seller. He organized a series of streamed conversations at roadside chai (tea) stalls as well as a radio series ‘Mann Ki Baat’ (Matters of the heart). In one of his many speeches on this theme he proclaims, ‘This is the beauty of India’s Constitution, this is its capability which has made it possible that today a boy from small town, a poor family, has the opportunity to pay homage to the tri-colour of India at the ramparts of Lal Quila [Red Fort].’ In a speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden in September 2014, he proclaimed, ‘I am a small and insignificant person. My childhood, too, was insignificant. I want to concentrate on small things because I am a small person, who wants to accomplish big feats for other small people.’ Modi’s repeated references to his low caste and class background appeals to the aspirations of upwardly mobile youth (Mitra and Schottli 2016). After assuming office in 2014, Modi described himself as an outsider to political life. In a speech on the 68th anniversary of Independence Day, he declared, Brothers and sisters, I am an outsider … I am not a native of Delhi. I have no idea about the administration and working of this place. I have been quite isolated from the elite class of this place but during the last two months while being an outsider, I had an insider view and I was astonished. (GoI 2014)

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He repeated this theme in his interview with TV talk-show host Arnab Goswami: ‘I do not have any previous baggage because I’ve had a clean slate. I write everything from the beginning and that has a benefit. Today we are building relations with countries across the world.’ Modi is a political outsider only in the limited sense that he is new to national politics; he was, of course, chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, first by appointment and later by election. However, his assertion evokes the RSS claim of being apolitical. It also echoes a view, rooted in Hindu philosophy and propagated by the RSS, that considers the world of politics dirty, corrupt, and unethical. Linked to Modi’s self-depiction as an outsider to politics is his expressed eagerness to take risks and express unpopular views because he is supposedly not primarily concerned with electoral success, in contrast to most political leaders and parties, who reduce democracy to elections. He claimed, in his interview with Arnab Goswami: Those who have seen me in Gujarat, and those who have seen me in the last two years, those who see me without any bias, they will know that I am an apolitical prime minister. Apart from elections, I don’t get involved in politics ever. You can call elections a necessity, a restraint or a responsibility, we have to do it. I attend many functions, go to different areas, you wouldn’t have heard any political comment from me. My focus is on governance. The country has been at greatest loss because governments were run only for elections. (Indian Express, 28 June 2016)

Modi’s major critique of elites has been directed at the Congress Party leadership. Indeed, it is striking that he displays none of the reverence for Congress leaders that he displays for M. K. Gandhi. Before and during the 2014 election campaign, Modi continuously depicted Sonia Gandhi, Congress Party leader and Modi’s main opponent, as a privileged foreigner. He asked, ‘What kind of people are these Congressmen? They can regard an Italian woman as their own, but they find a son of the soil like me an outsider.’ In the 2019 election campaign, Modi described himself not as a naamdar (member of a dynasty), but as a kamdar (working person). Modi responded to Rahul Gandhi’s slogan ‘chowkidar chor hai!’ (the watchman is the thief) by affirming his identity as a chowkidar and launching a Twitter campaign #MainBhiChowkidar (I too am a watchman). Modi thereby called attention to Rahul Gandhi’s disparaging depiction of him as a watchman and

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turned this to his own advantage by promising to safeguard democracy from established elites, such as the Nehru–Gandhi family, and asserting that India needed chowkidars, not rulers. However, if Modi has identified with the ‘little person’, he has also sought to emphasize his grandiosity. Whereas Gandhi was embarrassed by popular adulation (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 116), Modi craves and invites it. His imposing physical stature and comportment convey his sense of power. He boasts that he has the body of a wrestler (an allusion to the RSS wrestling tradition). His 2014 campaign speeches were peppered with references to his chhappan inch ki chhattee (56-inch chest). His persona is decidedly masculine. As the Rudolphs point out, Gandhi identified more with women than men because of his close identification with his mother, his nurturing qualities, his repudiation of British conceptions of strength, and his association of women with non-violence. If, as the Rudolphs note, Gandhi’s physical comportment expressed humility and simplicity, Modi has cultivated a flashy performative style of oration. Nikita Doval highlights Modi’s ability to rhetorically and bodily command and engage the attention of his audience, summoning humor, spontaneity, and carefully crafted imagery to elicit intense affective responses (Doval 2016). His speeches connote his Hindu nationalist affiliations. By speaking in Hindi rather than English, Modi has signaled his refusal to submit to the ways of Westernized Englishspeaking elites. Buttressed by his training in the RSS, where pracharaks are taught to speak a Hindi resembling Hindustani Khariboli or spoken Hindi today, expunged of Urdu words, Modi’s Hindi and oratory represent an aspirational ideal of a modernity that draws on a glorified Indian past. Contrast this with Gandhi, who promoted multiple Indian languages including Urdu and rejected the kind of modernity Modi embraces. Modi, unlike Gandhi, has explicitly cultivated an aura of being extraordinary. Tales of his superhuman powers during his childhood feature in books for children and adults. One of the most popular is about Modi swimming across a lake near his house to a temple on an island where he would pray three times a day. Although on one such occasion a crocodile seriously injured him, this did not prevent him from continuing to swim across the lake. The deification of Modi is apparent from his nickname NaMo, which is derived from the Sanskrit

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word namo and is generally only used as a salutation to Hindu gods. Modi masks, Modi kurtas, and Modi-branded cell phones and ring tones encourage veneration and identification with Modi. The media has played an extremely important role in fostering adulation of Modi. During the 2014 election campaign, Modi’s image was broadcast on innumerable televised shows, social media, and holograms. The media played an even bigger role, among far more people, in the 2019 elections. The media has also routinely made Modi appear to be omnipresent and larger than life. Modi’s YouTube channel, television broadcast station, NaMo TV, online radio archives, Pinterest board, LinkedIn site, and the Parliament’s video channel depict Modi in multiple roles—as statesman, innovator, philosopher, and guru. The messages they convey is that Modi is more than a great political leader—he is a saviour and visionary. The differences in the charismatic qualities of Gandhi and Modi are partly situational. There is a synergy between the sensibilities and beliefs of the two leaders and the context of their times. Gandhi’s genius was to encourage Indians to see colonialism as the source of their cultural and psychological injuries. Modi’s genius is to capture popular aspirations and the ambivalence around globalization. He has done this by combining a commitment to asceticism and cosmopolitanism. Although this might be seen as evidence of Hindu nationalists’ schizophrenia, or the tensions between their attachments to neoliberalism and cultural nationalism (Sangari 2003), Modi embodies a symbolic resolution of these tensions. On the one hand, he calls attention to his disciplined, austere, ascetic lifestyle. He awakens at 5 a.m. and works 18 hours a day, taking breaks only to meditate and do yoga. He is a vegetarian and a teetotaler. He claims to be a celibate who left his brief marriage to join the RSS. His discipline and hard work communicate his selflessness, self-sacrifice, and devotion to the nation.4 On the other hand, Modi has cultivated a distinctive and expensive fashion style. He uses luxury brand goods such as Bvglari glasses, Movado watches, and Mont Blanc pens. He famously spent over 14,000 (US) dollars of public funds for a suit monogramed with his name during Obama’s visit to India. By contrast, Gandhi performed his beliefs by wearing a simple loin cloth and eschewing materialism. Modi responds to middle-class ambitions and anxieties about neoliberalism and globalization. The vernacular middle classes (as opposed

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to the English-speaking elite) particularly want economic growth but fear its cultural consequences and seek a form of modernization that will not threaten tradition. Modi has linked his developmental and Hindu majoritarian agendas, thereby appealing to the middle classes’ material and identity concerns (Palshikar 2018). Modi also forms affective ties to middle-class Indians who feel that the West has not fully recognized India’s past contributions or future potential and who want it to be more recognized, respected, and powerful within the global community. In combining asceticism and Western opulence, Modi embodies India’s changing image in the world. He uses anti-Orientalist language to correct outdated and wrongful perceptions of what India is today. Take for example the following speech: Till only 25–30 years back, if not more, there were many people in the world who thought that India was a country of snake charmers, it was a country which practiced black magic. The real identity of India had not reached the world, but my dear brothers and sisters, our youngsters, 20-22-23-year-old youngsters have mesmerized the whole world with their skills in computers. (Indian Express, 16 August 2014)

Modi exuded pride in India’s achievements in his extensive travels after the 2014 elections. Speaking at an exhibition centre near Shanghai in May 2015, Modi told the Indians in attendance, ‘Earlier, you felt ashamed of being born Indian. Now you feel proud to represent the country. Indians abroad had all hoped for a change in government last year.’ In Seoul, he suggested that Indians had formerly left the country because it was steeped in despondence and darkness, but now people from all walks of life sought to return (Gupta 2015). By contrast, Gandhi rejected Western civilizational values and the quest for global power with which it was associated. As this comparison suggests, there are important similarities and crucial differences in the charismatic appeals of Gandhi and Modi that the Rudolphs enable us to appreciate. Both leaders draw inspiration from traditional values. Both leaders bridge the private–public divide by claiming a commitment to ascetic values, drawing religion into politics, and forging affective ties to their followers. Both of them provide effective responses to the social and psychological anxieties of their eras. Both leaders appeal to popular democratic impulses by locating themselves outside the conventional political arena, as activists rather

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than electorally motivated politicians. Where they differ dramatically is in their exercise of moral authority. Although Modi makes a show of being moralistic, his moral appeals are outwardly rather than inwardly focused. Unlike Gandhi, who held himself accountable when violence occurred, Modi steadfastly refuses to take such responsibility. Unlike Gandhi, who valued all religions, Modi’s empathy is confined to people of his faith.

Modi’s Invocation of Gandhi To return to a question I raised earlier, what light does Modi’s invocation of Gandhi shed on his cultivation of a charismatic leadership style? Modi may seek to identify with Gandhi because Gandhi remains a touchstone of moral leadership and has become emblematic of tradition. Thus, even when he acts in ways that contradict Gandhi’s beliefs, invoking Gandhi may boost Modi’s moral authority and credentials. Alternatively, Gandhi may be an empty signifier, particularly because so much of Gandhi’s legacy is open to dispute. Vinay Lal writes, ‘What is palpably true, and something that calls for continued reflection, is that “Gandhi” has become, if he has not been for some time, an empty vessel—and we will pour into it what we choose’ (Lal 2007). Thus Modi may invoke Gandhi in order to denigrate Gandhi’s significance. There is some truth to both of these interpretations. Modi has sometimes invoked Gandhi to disingenuously feign a commitment to non-violence. For example, in a speech before the US Congress in 2016, Modi first stated that he was dedicated to Gandhian principles, and shortly thereafter spoke of the need to fight the war on terrorism by all means possible, including militarily. Another example: in June 2017, after Hindutva groups stabbed a 16-year-old Muslim boy named Junaid Khan, Modi stated that Gandhi would have disapproved of such violence. However, Modi has not held his followers responsible for violence or taken steps that would prevent its recurrence. His reference to Gandhi signalled an attempt to absolve himself of responsibility, not to assume it. Modi sometimes invokes Gandhi to place him on the same plane as RSS leaders and to imply that their ideas are compatible. In one interview, Modi claimed that both Gandhi and Deen Dayal Upadhyay,

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a lifelong RSS member and leader of the BJP’s predecessor, Jan Sangh, sought to ‘reach the last man in the line’ by determining how ‘the poorest of the poor can benefit from development’. Modi has initiated major commemorations of Upadhyay’s birth centenary. Modi has also invoked Gandhi to appropriate him. Take, for example, one of Modi’s major campaigns around sanitation. The BJP’s 2014 election manifesto promised a ‘Swacch Bharat’ (Clean India) and Modi began the campaign on 2 October 2014, Gandhi’s birthday (known in India as Gandhi Jayanti). He launched the campaign with a symbolically significant gesture: sweeping the streets of Delhi with a broom. In his speech that day he said that there was no better way to honour Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary in 2019 than by cleaning up India because Gandhi so deeply valued cleanliness. He called for popular participation in the campaign because cleanliness would not result from a government edict. On Gandhi’s birthday in October 2017, Modi stated, ‘Mahatma Gandhi is as relevant to the world now as he was during his lifetime. … For Mahatma Gandhi, cleanliness was more important than freedom. … Let us all walk on the footpath laid down by Mahatma Gandhi and fulfill his wishes.’ To oversee the Swacch Bharat campaign, Modi established a committee that included several foreign dignitaries. India also hosted a Mahatma Gandhi International Sanitation Convention in 2018 to share sanitation success stories and best practices. As the Rudolphs note, Gandhi was notoriously concerned with cleanliness (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 121). Furthermore, Gandhi insisted on participating in cleaning his own home rather than demanding that lower-caste servants do so. Picking up a broom and sweeping the streets aligns Modi with Gandhi. However, there are some important differences between Gandhi and Modi on the question of cleanliness. Gandhi was extremely critical of the dirt in Varanasi, the city that Modi chose as his constituency in the 2019 elections. Furthermore, to suggest that Gandhi prioritized cleanliness over freedom is inaccurate and extricates one of Gandhi’s goals from his broader social platform (Palshikar 2014). Modi’s Swacch Bharat campaign is also symbolically significant in other respects. Cleaning the streets could be a metaphor for cleaning up public life, that is, ending corruption. Cleanliness has connotations of purity and respectability for racist right-wing groups. Cleaning the

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streets signifies to the middle classes and the West that India is making itself more presentable. In one of his speeches Modi said, There is a big obstacle in promoting tourism and in our national character, and that is—the filthiness all around us. Whether after Independence, after so many years of independence, when we stand at the threshold of one and half decade of 21st century, we still want to live in filthiness? (Indian Express, 16 August 2014)

Modi has not simply claimed an affinity with Gandhi: he has sought to displace Gandhi and elevate his own leadership. For example, he took the controversial step of removing an iconic image that appears in an official calendar of Gandhi spinning khadi and replaced it with a picture of himself at the spinning wheel. In this move, which the staff at the Khadi and Village Industries Commission protested, Modi identified himself with an important symbol of the anti-colonial struggle. For Gandhi, spinning, and by extension swadeshi, were linked to several goals, including commitment to self-reliance, self-rule, and national freedom. Modi’s understanding of swadeshi is, by comparison, much thinner.

Gandhi, Modi, Democracy, and Populism There are some similarities yet more striking differences between Gandhi and Modi in their understandings of democracy. The Rudolphs argue that, although Gandhi was committed to certain attributes of democracy, including self-rule, transparency, accountability, inclusiveness, and non-violence, he did not believe that they could be achieved through liberal forms of representation, elections, and individual rights. Gandhi considered the state to be a soulless machine that was founded on violence and distrusted political parties because of their statist character (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 142). Just 24 hours before his assassination in January 1948, Gandhi proposed that the Indian National Congress be dissolved and replaced by a Lok Sevak Sangh, a people’s service organization. Although the Rudolphs do not use the term ‘populist’ to describe Gandhi, that depiction would have been apt. The forms of democracy that Gandhi promoted, the Rudolphs argue, entailed bringing marginalized and oppressed people into public life. They describe him as a tireless creator of civil society (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 141). To the extent that he believed associations had an

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important role to play in democracy, his model was the ashrams, which the Rudolphs characterize as an energizing centre of associational life and political activism. Partha Chatterjee anticipates that had Gandhi survived, post-Independence leaders would have found his conception of democracy anachronistic (Chatterjee 1986). Modi shares some aspect of Gandhi’s view of democracy. Like Gandhi, Modi is a critic of representative institutions. He has sought to establish a direct and unmediated relationship to people and claims to value popular participation. In a speech to the upper house of the Parliament in February 2018, Modi stated that Gandhi wanted a Congress-mukht Bharat (or a Congress-free India) after Independence. However, Modi failed to identify Gandhi’s underlying motivation, which was to challenge the centralization of power in parties and the state, and his ultimate goal, which was to refashion Congress as a people’s organization. Modi differs dramatically from Gandhi on the role of the state and civil society. He has allowed state officials to engage in hate speech and violence against Christians and Muslims and has refashioned democracy along majoritarian lines. He has significantly centralized power and weakened the institutions that are designed to check executive powers. He has used legal, institutional, and bureaucratic means to curtail the activities of progressive NGOs and repeatedly curbed dissent on grounds that it is ‘anti-national’, a vague allegation that authorizes arrests under the provision of antiquated colonial laws outlawing sedition and criminal conspiracy. Ironically, these same laws were used to arrest Gandhi. Modi is deeply suspicious of critics, be they scholars, activists, or members of opposition parties, as well as those whom the government deems outsiders to the nation, namely Muslim and Christian minorities and Muslim immigrants. However, like other populists, Modi has masked the damage he has done to democracy by claiming to wrest power from elites and restore it to the people. The Rudolphs did not devote much attention to populism, with the exception of an important essay by Lloyd Rudolph on populism in Tamil Nadu, in which he says, Populism is no ideology. It has no Marx or Engels, not even a Mill, to speak for it. While movements have labeled themselves as populist, the term remains essentially a synthetic category, a state of mind which historians and students of politics have recognized in a variety of settings. It may feed totalitarianism of either the right or the left, but by itself it is something less. (Rudolph 1961)

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He describes populists’ radicalism as growing out of both the threats and the potentiality of democratic ideals. He says, prophetically, of populism: It embraces the attitudes of the small man threatened by the large impersonal forces of a modern economy. … The fluidity and mobility characteristic of an emergent democratic, industrial order create an uncertainty concerning his identity and a sense of powerlessness and frustration about his ability to understand or to control his environment. His response under these circumstances is characterized by both rationality and irrationality, reality and fantasy. In his effort to establish a manageable identity and meaningful status, his fantasies fasten on romantic parochialisms compounded of both real and imagined racial, cultural, and regional categories and are expressed through a conspiratorial demonology. (Rudolph 1961, 283–97)

Rudolph appreciates the societal changes that are associated with the emergence of populist movements. His description of the instabilities associated with industrialization and the identity and status anxieties it ignites are more relevant than ever in neoliberal India. Drawing on the Rudolphs’ writings on democracy and populism, it seems clear that populism presents an alternative to Gandhian democracy and the form of liberal democracy that characterized Indian politics until Modi’s ascent. It combines a radical aversion to the status quo with a conservative commitment to social hierarchies and inequalities, and it depends on charismatic, unethical leadership. *** It is a testimony to the Rudolphs that their understanding of Gandhi’s charismatic leadership enables us to gain a better understanding of what neither they nor any other scholar of Indian politics could have anticipated, namely Modi’s ascent to power amidst the growth of Hindu nationalism and right-wing populism. The Rudolphs identified many key questions that the study of political leadership should raise. Among other things, this includes an attentiveness to the psychological/cultural dimensions of leaders’ relationship to their followers; an appreciation of how leadership is performed, enacted, and embodied; and an assessment of how leaders locate themselves in relationship to the past and the present, or in the Rudolphs’ language, to tradition and modernity. Furthermore, these questions

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are not only germane to the Indian or the post-colonial context but to many regions of the world. It is also a testimony to the Rudolphs that their analysis opens up so many productive questions. One of these concerns the relationship between tradition and modernity. Partly in response to pervasive ethnocentrism, the Rudolphs focused on the positive attributes of tradition. In the process, they neglected the ways in which leaders employed tradition not to achieve emancipatory goals, as Gandhi did, but for reactionary purposes. In many parts of the world, political leaders have sought to deny rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ groups in the name of preserving tradition. Thus, if, as the Rudolphs argue, societies have modernized not despite but because of their creative reinterpretations of tradition, recent developments encourage us to extend their analysis to recognize that leaders, movements, and regimes often invoke tradition to turn back the clock on progress. A second question concerns agency. Again in response to then dominant perspectives—in this case, determinist analyses of both Marxists and modernization theorists—the Rudolphs emphasized Gandhi’s exercise of agency in mobilizing the masses to defeat the mighty British empire. However, arguably, leaders are as much the products of their environment as the architects who design it. Gandhi’s identity, and the identities of his followers, was in important respects a product of the colonial encounter. Similarly, Modi’s identity is arguably a product of current contestations around the achievements of secularism, democracy, globalization, and neoliberalism amidst the growth of sectarianism and xenophobic nationalism. This is not to deny the importance of leaders’ temperaments and beliefs and the strategies they employ in pursuing their goals. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems essential to accord greater importance than the Rudolphs did to the historical conditions that are associated with the emergence and effectiveness of political leaders. A third question that the Rudolphs raise concerns the importance of morality to effective leadership. The Rudolphs suggest that Gandhi was able to overcome the divisions among Indian nationalists and mobilize mass support because his leadership was not just strategic but also ethical. In the current era, there has been a growth of strong-arm leadership in many regions of the world. Although some of these leaders are moralistic, their actions demonstrate a disregard for ethical norms

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and values. Indeed, their unethical behaviour has often increased their popularity. I contend that Modi is both unethical and charismatic. Finally, and relatedly, what room is there for normative analysis? The Rudolphs adopted a nuanced stance which had important methodological implications. It suggested that scholars could remain dispassionate, balanced, and even objective while recognizing the subjective dimensions of political life. This approach informed their analysis of Gandhi and the stance they adopted towards him. While never explicitly expressing adulation, their immense admiration for Gandhi was palpable. What dispositions should inform our understanding of leaders who promote discrimination, violence, and illiberal values? How would the Rudolphs have approached the study of Modi? The answers to this and other questions I have raised are by no means simple. But simplification was not what the Rudolphs sought.

Endnotes 1. I am grateful to John Echeverri-Gent, Dipankar Gupta, Zoya Hasan, Pinky Hota, Mark Kesselman, Uday Mehta, Amna Pathan, and Kamal Sadiq for their many helpful comments and suggestions. 2. Thakur was charged with conspiring and carrying out the 2008 bomb blasts in Malegaon, a Muslim-majority city of Maharashtra, that killed 9 people. 3. See http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/68086731.cms?utm_ source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst, last accessed on 24 February 2020. 4. Modi’s sacrifices are largely symbolic. He fasts as an annual act of religious observance during the Navratri festival and occasionally engages in a daylong fast as an act of protest. By contrast, Gandhi fasted as a means of penance when he felt he or the freedom movement had erred. Between 1918 and 1948, he fasted at least 15 times, in the hope that his moral force would quell religious riots, support striking mill workers, and defeat British colonialism. His longest fast was 21 days.

References Alter, Joseph. 1994. ‘Somatic Nationalism: Indian Wrestling and Militant Hinduism’. Modern Asian Studies 28 (3): 557–88. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London: Zed Books.

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Doval, Nikita. 2016. ‘What Makes Narendra Modi a Good Speaker?’ LiveMint, 9 June. Available at https://www.livemint.com/Politics/yMfTQqQCb2nL4VYkHrbGhK/ What-makes-Narendra-Modi-a-good-speaker.html. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. Gandhi, M.K. 2015. ‘Christian in Disguise’. In Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. Government of India (GoI). 2014. ‘Prime Minister Addresses the Nation from the Ramparts of the Red Fort on the 68th Independence Day’. Prime Minister’s Office, Press Information Bureau, 15 August. Available at https://pib.gov.in/ newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=108819. Last accessed on 24 February 2020. Gupta, Dipankar. 2018. ‘Gandhi and King’. Seminar no. 712 (December). Available at http://india-seminar.com/2018/712/712_dipankar_gupta.htm. Last accessed on 24 February 2020. Gupta, Monobina. 2015. ‘The Most Visible Part of the India Growth Story Has Been Modi’s Increasing Ability to Laud Himself’. The Caravan, 25 May. Available at https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/most-visible-india-growthstory-modi-speeches. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. ———. 2019. ‘How Modi Won the Status War’. Open Magazine, 7 June. Available at https://openthemagazine.com/cover-stories/how-modi-wonthe-status-war/. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. Indian Express. 2014. ‘Full Text: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Speech on 68th Independence Day’. 16 August. Available at https://indianexpress.com/ article/india/india-others/full-text-prime-minister-narendra-modis-speechon-68th-independence-day/. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. ———. 2016. ‘PM Modi’s interview with Arnab Goswami: Full transcript’. 28 June. Available at https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/ pm-modis-interview-with-arnab-goswami-full-transcript-2879832/. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. Lal, Vinay. 2007. ‘Modi, the Mahatma, and Mendacity’. UCLA Social Sciences MANAS, 14 October. Available at http://southasia.ucla.edu/history-politics/ gandhi/modi-mahatama-mendacity/. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. Mehta, Uday. n.d. ‘A Discriminating Politics: Prejudice and Toleration’, unpublished manuscript. Mitra, Subrata K., and Jivanta Schottli. 2016. ‘India’s 2014 General Elections: A Critical Realignment in Indian Politics?’ Asian Survey 56 (4): 614. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2017. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nandy, Ashis 2007. ‘The Lure of “Normal” Politics: Gandhi and the Battle for Popular Culture of Politics in India’. South Asian Popular Culture 5 (2) (October): 167–78. doi: 10.1080/14746680701619586.

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Noorani, A.G. 2016. ‘The RSS and Gandhi: A Necessary Backstory’. The Wire, 24 July. Available at https://thewire.in/books/the-rss-and-gandhi-2. Last accessed on 24 February 2020. Palshikar, Suhas. 2014. ‘Cleansing Gandhi of Radicalism’. The Indian Express, 7 October. Available at https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/ cleansing-gandhi-of-radicalism/. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. ———. 2018. ‘Towards Hegemony: BJP beyond Electoral Dominance’. Economic and Political Weekly 3 (33) (18 August): 36–42. Rudolph, Lloyd I. 1961. ‘Urban Life and Populist Radicalism: Dravidian Politics in Madras’. The Journal of Asian Studies 20 (3) (May): 283–97. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2050816. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1983a. Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1983b. The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2006. Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 1963. ‘The New Courage: An Essay on Gandhi’s Psychology’. World Politics 16 (1) (October): 98–117. Available at http:// www.jstor.org/stable/2009253. Last accessed on 24 February 2020. ———. 2013. ‘Gandhi’s India, the World’s Gandhi’. In Routledge Handbook of Indian Politics, edited by Prerna Singh and Atul Kohli, 40. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ———. 1965–6. ‘Self-Control and Political Potency: Gandhi’s Asceticism’. The American Scholar 35 (1) (Winter): 79–97. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber, and Lloyd I. Rudolph. 1993 ‘Modern Hate: How Ancient Animosities Get Invented’. The New Republic, 22 March. Sangari, Kumkum. 2003. ‘New Nations, Old Civilizations: A Partition Narrative’. The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10 (4): 473–80. Stokes, Bruce, Dorothy Manevich, and Hanyu Chwe. 2017. ‘Three Years In, Modi Remains Very Popular’. Pew Research Center, 15 November. Available at http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/11/15/india-modi-remains-very-popularthree-years-in/. Last accessed on 24 February 2020. Tucker, Robert. 1968. ‘The Theory of Charismatic Leadership’. Daedalus 97 (73): 731–56. Wakankar, Milind. 1995. ‘Body, Crowd, Identity: Genealogy of a Hindu Nationalist Ascetics’. Social Text, no. 45 (Winter): 45–73. Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, edited by Talcott Parsons. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

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In Pursuit of Saraswati The Politics of Autonomy in the Indian University

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n 20 March 2018, the Government of India announced its decision to award ‘autonomy’ to 60 institutions of higher education that had maintained high academic standards. The level of autonomy would be graded and determined on the basis of their performance as evaluated by the national accreditation agency and their ranking by the national rankings agency. This policy announcement triggered an immediate outcry, widespread protests, and much adverse commentary—not from the 800 universities not offered this crown, but from the very universities that were being so decorated. To anybody unfamiliar with higher education in India, such a reaction would seem irrational and incomprehensible, if not absurd. How could any publicly funded university possibly abjure greater autonomy, for is autonomy not the very lifeblood of a university? The clue to this apparently incongruous response lies buried in the history of the Indian university from colonial times to the present. The contemporary debate on autonomy is a provocation for revisiting not this entire history but the insights provided almost half a century ago by Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph in a landmark book: Education and Politics in India: Studies in Organization, Society and Policy (1972). The Rudolphs were remarkably perceptive about where the threats to university autonomy emanated from in the Indian university of their time but somewhat ambivalent about the institutional arrangements

Niraja Gopal Jayal, In Pursuit of Saraswati: The Politics of Autonomy in the Indian University. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190125011.003.0009

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for guaranteeing it. This ambivalence is understandable because the governance of higher education was in the germinal phase of its postIndependence evolution and had yet to manifest some of its present complexities. Today, not only do we confront the threats to university autonomy that the Rudolphs as well as many others identified, autonomy itself appears as a threat, or at least a poisoned chalice. This chapter examines the Rudolphs’ argument about the relationship between politics, autonomy, and education in India, and engages with it in the context of the substantially transformed landscape of higher education today.

The Rudolphs on Education and Politics in India The subtitle of the Rudolphs’ book implicitly flags the persistent tension between the competing impulses of bureaucratization and democratization that has marked the history of the public university in post-Independence India. Since this book is not widely known even amongst the admirers of the Rudolphs, I begin with a brief account of their analysis of higher education and politics in India. The structure of the book is somewhat unusual. Partly a monograph and partly an edited volume, it has four parts, of which the first—in turn divided into six chapter-like segments—is written entirely by the Rudolphs. The remaining three parts have essays by political scientists such as Harold Gould, Iqbal Narain, and Paul Brass, and sociologists such as T.N. Madan. Most of these are case studies of particular institutions in states ranging from Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan to Karnataka and Gujarat. Only one of them—a study of Baroda University—is by the Rudolphs themselves. The other universities that get in-depth treatment include Osmania University, Presidency College Calcutta, Muir College Allahabad, and the (Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental) MAO College, Aligarh. In this book, published in 1972, the Rudolphs identified three aspects of the relationship between education and politics as significant: • First, the politicization of educational structures refers to the attempts by political actors to mobilize and maximize political resources by penetrating educational institutions. • The second refers to the use, mostly by vice chancellors, of political skills and strategies to influence policy decisions and resource

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allocation in a way that would be favourable to higher education in general, but also to particular institutions. • Finally, the assertion by the State of a public interest in education, which is admittedly hard to define or identify in its articulation by public authorities. (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 8) The context for this relationship is set by the Rudolphs’ insight (recalling the argument in their book The Modernity of Tradition) that while traditional structures such as castes and villages had become more cosmopolitan, universities, despite being modern structures, had become more parochial. As universities have become more socially and culturally representative, they have been penetrated and shaped by democratic as against elite, by indigenous as against anglicized, norms and behaviour. (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 5)

And further, The university’s expansion of reference groups, then, is in a direction which draws its attention away from the world of scholarship and learning and toward the interests and preoccupations of the mofussil (or locality). (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 6)

These insights enabled the Rudolphs to signal an important trend that characterized the transition of the Indian university, with its eliteand English language–bias in colonial times, to the post-Independence period, in which higher education acquired a popular character. There was now pressure on the government, including in the states, to expand higher education to make it, in consonance with the idea of equality of opportunity, available to every eligible student. This required the establishment of new colleges and universities and the corresponding allocation of resources. The first type of politicization specified by the Rudolphs was an aspect of this acceleration in demand for institutions of higher education. It was hardly surprising that the promise of the establishment of higher education institutions, and the political uses of these by political actors, should follow. The demand for the expansion of higher education came to be intensely politicized with territorial, caste, and religious communities founding colleges. Likewise, regions within states clamoured for the establishment of colleges. Given the widespread

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association between higher education and the desire for status, wealth, and power, political representatives saw their personal political fate resting partly on satisfying such demands. As the Rudolphs wrote, the ordinary legislator was neither concerned with how that demand was satisfied, nor with the quality of education provided, if doing so in any way obstructed his search for political support and influence (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 34). As colleges and universities became primarily a political resource for politicians, there was a ‘displacement of educational goals by organized political and community (religion, caste, locality) interests’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 8). Appointments— from those of vice chancellors to those of ordinary academics—became enmeshed in ‘political and community competition’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 8). The net result of this was ‘to subsume the educational goals and processes of particular educational institutions to those of organized extraeducational interests’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 8). The essays by Harold Gould on Faizabad district in Uttar Pradesh (UP), and Carolyn Elliott on Osmania University, Hyderabad, illustrate these trends powerfully: the competition, convergence, and conflict between political and educational entrepreneurs in UP; and the tension between cosmopolitan university elites and rural political elites in the case of Osmania. In the decades since the publication of the Rudolphs’ book, this form of politicization has grown exponentially and has become so normalized that it has ceased to elicit either surprise or disapproval. Less resonant today is the second aspect of the relationship, that is, the political influence exercised by educational structures. The Rudolphs spoke of how vice chancellors of stature, such as Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee or Mohan Singh Mehta, used their political skills to obtain allocations of resources and influence public decisions. The days when educators and vice chancellors went on to become the vice president of the republic, or even Members of Parliament, are long gone. On the contrary, since the appointments of vice chancellors are based so heavily on their political affiliations, and in some cases even on perverse incentives such as rent seeking, vice chancellors are typically unable to exercise autonomy even within their domains, let alone to speak truth to power. If they have the ability to exercise political influence, it is more likely to be used for their personal advancement than for furthering the interests of their institutions, much less the good of higher education in general. In recent times, vice chancellors have attempted to facilitate

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ideological capture on behalf of the ruling party by seeking to influence, control, and bias the intellectual activities of their universities. Finally, the Rudolphs themselves averred that it was difficult to distinguish ‘assertion by the state of a public interest in education’ from politicization. Intellectuals, they wrote, believed that ‘judging scholarly work and its transmission are functions requiring expertise beyond the reach of lay opinion, and must be vested in a community of professional scholars’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 10). However, given that it was popularly elected governments that were in charge of making resource allocations to universities from public monies, the need to justify these expenditures, as against competing claims, entailed the approval of public opinion.1 This made it difficult to distinguish politicization from the legitimate expression of public interest in education. Once again, the Osmania case study showed how a state government, already rebuffed by the Supreme Court in its attempt to unseat the vice chancellor, used its financial powers by holding back the university’s funds (Elliott 1972, 303–4). This was despite the vice chancellor announcing that the university would be facing closure. The dependence of the university on government financing clearly undermined its autonomy. The question of autonomy—or at least its obverse, governmental control or interference (depending upon one’s perspective)—informs the Rudolphs’ engagement with the policy recommendations of the major commissions on education.2 They dwelt on the early arguments offered for greater governmental control, such as the mid-nineteenthcentury colonial anxiety that unless the government appointed the members of university senates, religious and political feuds amongst Indians would consume these bodies. The hold of the colonial State relaxed somewhat in the following years, with energetically conducted competitive elections to the senate of Calcutta University, till 1904 when Lord Curzon’s administration passed the Indian Universities Act, providing for unprecedented levels of government influence, including the power to alter the regulations of the universities. This was ostensibly done to protect (rather than invade) university autonomy from the depredations of politically motivated ambitious Indians. At stake for the latter was the enormous power to affiliate colleges that university senates enjoyed. At stake for the colonial government was the heightened articulation of nationalist opinion in Indian universities, viewed as politicizing institutions that needed to be put in their place, that is,

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confined to their role as purely educational institutions. The Rudolphs’ own position on autonomy here is intriguingly equivocal: Yet it would be wrong to say that strong government influence in higher education is necessarily asserted at the expense of university autonomy. If autonomy is understood as the freedom to determine and to realize educational goals, it may also on occasion be threatened from within the institution by administrators, faculty members, or students, and from without by organized political forces that appropriate what should be educational goals and resources to serve partisan, self-interested, or ideological ends. When the threat to university autonomy comes from these sources, the assertion of government influence may strengthen educational goals. Autonomy must be judged in its social and political contexts as well as in terms of institutional arrangements and relationships. (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 18; emphasis added)

There is an unambiguous acknowledgement here of the fact that threats to autonomy come both from within and outside the university. Equally unambiguously, the Rudolphs assert that governmental influence would be a force for the good, as it could actually protect universities from ‘organized political forces’ (outside) and the politics of faculty, students, and administration (inside). Signalled here is a curious distinction between government as a neutral arbiter on the one hand and a political/ideological force that is partisan and self-interested on the other, with a somewhat naïve belief that threats of politicization from both within and without the academy can be effectively countered by the non-partisan assertion of influence by the government, assumed to be politically neutral. The implications of politicization for autonomy are elaborated to logical but disconcerting effect. For the Rudolphs, the greater the politician’s interest in the university, the more vulnerable these institutions were rendered, and the less capable were they of defending themselves against incursions. In other words, in less democratic times, universities were relatively secluded and enjoyed greater autonomy; as the demand for higher education increased, this separateness diminished and universities were weakened (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 31). The Rudolphs’ approach to the question of autonomy also informs their assessment, later in the book, of the role of the University Grants Commission (UGC). They recognized its limitations which they saw as emanating chiefly from the political realities of a federal polity

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(education was still a state subject at this time) and the UGC’s dependence on state governments to provide matching grants. They also acknowledged that the UGC had not, for the most part, exercised its legitimate power to withhold funds from universities that were noncompliant with its recommendations (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 74–5). Nevertheless, keeping the constraints of federalism in view, as well as the likely impact on university autonomy, they felt it may be unwise to suggest that the UGC should use its authority more energetically (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 76). On the one hand, they were in agreement with the education commissions of 1948 and 1964–6 that the UGC could obviate direct governmental/ministerial control over universities by privileging knowledge over political affiliation or official status (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 72). On the other hand, the Rudolphs argued, it was possible that the dispersal of authority—across ministries responsible for general, medical, agricultural, and technical education respectively—could, in fact, encourage the development of different approaches to education. Whether the argument favours more or less control by the UGC, the absence of a critical assessment of this body is consistent with recent accounts of the UGC that suggest that it had as yet not acquired the extensive powers it presently enjoys (Ayyar 2017, 83). Nevertheless, the Rudolphs did flag the fact that state governments were wont to establish new universities without permission from the UGC or against its explicit advice, and the inability of the UGC to prevent such flagrant violations was definitely a matter of concern to them. This chapter revisits the Rudolphs’ thesis on education and politics with a particular focus on three aspects of this relationship in subsequent decades: the nature and impact of the politicization of higher education; the assertion by the State of a public interest in education; and the role of the state University Grants Commission in regulating universities. The first two of these are drawn from the Rudolphs’ own typology of the education–politics relationship. The third revisits the Rudolphs’ discussion of the UGC, while framing it in terms of the thesis advanced in a later essay of theirs on the post-1991 shift from an interventionist to a regulatory state (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001). Each of these is examined in terms of its impact on university autonomy. For example, can the government remain above politics and enable the protection of university autonomy, as the Rudolphs suggested, or is the

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government itself a carrier of politics and, given the nature and scale of its control over higher education, the chief threat to autonomy? Could the UGC realistically perform the role of a protective buffer between the government and the university? Fifty years on, and in a dramatically altered context, why has autonomy become a contested concept?

Education and Politics in India since the Rudolphs The landscape of higher education in India is, not surprisingly, transformed beyond recognition since the time the Rudolphs published their book. In 1950–2, India had 30 universities and 695 colleges. In 1980–1, there were 133 universities and 4,722 colleges. By 2018–19, there were 993 universities, 39,931 colleges and 10,725 stand alone institutions (such as polytechnics and teacher-training institutes). The total enrolment in higher education institutions (HEIs) is 37.4 million students (gross enrolment ratio of 26.3 per cent) or 178 times the number of students enrolled right after Independence (Government of India 2019). It has been calculated that in the dozen or so years between 2000–1 and 2013–14, the average increase in the number of colleges was 40 new colleges per week. ‘In 2013–14 alone, 2,467 new colleges opened—nearly seven per day (including weekends!)’ (Kapur and Mehta 2017, 3). It is obvious that, even though the demand remains much greater than the available supply, there has been a massification of higher education. In public universities this has come with provisions for social justice through affirmative action; in private universities, mostly without. There has also been the re-emergence of a large private sector with a professional degree orientation for the most part. The figures for 2016–17 indicate that of the total number of 864 universities, 313 or 36 per cent are privately managed. What the figures do not reveal is how poorly funded these institutions are, with low quality infrastructure and massive vacancies of faculty. In just the premier institutions, vacancies range from 22 per cent in the IIMs to 38 per cent in central universities to 41 per cent in the IITs. In the University of Delhi alone, estimates of the number of teachers without tenure (described variously as ad hoc teachers or guest lecturers) is approximately 4,000. In the colleges and universities outside of these privileged institutional enclaves, the vacancies are typically much higher. What the official statistics also do not

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reveal are the phenomena of political interference and rigged markets in academic jobs; the monetization of everything from degrees to jobs at every level; and mass credentialization without substance, leading to unemployability of serious proportions.

1. From Politicization to Democratization The two decades after the publication of their book saw an acceleration, but also a rechristening, of the phenomenon of politicization described by the Rudolphs. The former took the form of an unchecked growth of colleges and universities, the latter its packaging as democratization, because expansion was seen as fulfilling the noble social purpose of expanding access. As politicization was projected as democratization, little attention was given, despite niggling doubts about these, to falling standards and the quality of education imparted. It was some time before access was officially democratized through reservations for Other Backward Classes in the early 1990s, but the tension between politicization and democratization (seen as guarantors of access and equity) on the one hand, and quality, excellence, and academic standards on the other became and remains a running theme in debates on higher education. Meanwhile, lacunae in the regulatory structure facilitated the unplanned mushrooming of colleges and universities. The very statement of the objects and reasons of the University Grants Commission Act of 1956 affirms that one impetus for the legislation was to ensure that the central government had some voice in determining standards of teaching and examination in the universities. ‘The problem,’ it stated, ‘has become more acute recently on account of the tendency to multiply Universities’ (UGC Act 1956). Section 12(f) of the Act, however, made the UGC’s advice in the establishment of new universities nonmandatory. Its function, under this section, was to ‘advise any authority, if such advice is asked for, on the establishment of a new University’ (emphasis added). This encouraged the establishment of a large numbers of new universities not just without consultation with the UGC but even against its advice. The Act was amended three times—in 1968, in 1972, and again in 1984—to enable the UGC to refuse funding to universities and colleges established without its approval and also to de-recognize them (Prasad 2007, 180–1).

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Proliferating at an unprecedented rate, these institutions of higher education were often owned by entrepreneurial politicians. The Rudolphs had identified the imperatives of political capital as the trigger for such expansion. To this were now added the inducements of commerce. From using, as the Rudolphs had said, public universities and colleges to build political resources, politicians began to themselves establish private universities and colleges. For landowner politicians, this was a lucrative avenue for the investment of their surplus earnings from agriculture. Their political clout facilitated the securing of recognition from government agencies, which resulted in the accumulation of not just political and community capital but economic capital as well, and often the creation of dynastic centres of profit-making as well as political lineages. What the Rudolphs had identified as politicization also demanded close alignments to the state, as politicians depended upon public institutions to generate political resources. For their founders, then, these colleges and universities became sites for the fulfilment of several objectives simultaneously: meeting the aspirations of the young belonging to particular castes/communities; building political support and a voter base; and making money, which was also a significant political resource. Some of these colleges, especially those offering medical and engineering courses, began to charge differential fees, with certain aspirants to admission (such as out-ofstate or non-resident Indians) being asked to pay donations or ‘capitation’ fee for ‘management’ quota seats, ostensibly to cross-subsidise the standard-fee paying students on government quota ‘seats’. In many such institutions the intersection of caste, class, and power was a lethal mix in which concern for the quality of education found absolutely no place, as vividly illustrated in Rekha Kaul’s (1993) study of professional colleges in Karnataka. The Vokkaligas and the Lingayats— dominant backward castes as also well-off landed peasants—were leaders in establishing private professional colleges. Their managements were generally single-caste trusts—driven by the motivation to cultivate social recognition and secure political power—but the capacity to pay capitation fees was an important factor in granting admission to those from different social groups (Kaul 1993, 89–90). Over time, these groups drew substantial political benefits from the expansion of higher education, as the setting up of an engineering college or even a polytechnic in a rural area was a way of satisfying their constituents. It was

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thus political considerations, rather than those to do with planning for economic development or employment, that determined what kind of college would be set up and where (Kaul 1993, 105). Unsurprisingly, then, the quality of teaching was poor: only a small percentage of faculty possessed postgraduate degrees. Many were hired to work parttime or as teaching assistants/tutors at low salaries. Their wages were lower than those in government colleges who were also better qualified (Kaul 1993, Chapter 7).3 The report of the Education Commission, chaired by Professor D.S. Kothari, had just been published in 1966, and responded to trends similar to those observed contemporaneously by the Rudolphs: the increasing demand for higher education making education less elite and more popular, as well as the politicization of higher education. The reception of the Kothari Commission Report suggests that the tension between the elite and the popular tendencies noted by the Rudolphs was experienced not just at the political level but manifested also at the national level of policy making for higher education. Two of its significant recommendations became politically controversial and remained unheeded by policy makers. The first and most important of these, the proposal to set up ‘a small number of major universities which would aim to achieve the highest international standards’ (Government of India 1970: vol. 1, p. iv)—arguably the predecessors of today’s ‘world-class universities’ or, even more recently, ‘Institutions of Eminence’4—came in for severe criticism on the grounds, as D.R. Gadgil put it, that the teachers and students of these universities would behave like snobs while the rest would have an inferiority complex (Ayyar 2017, 53–4). The second was a proposal to introduce selectivity in admissions. The justification offered for this was that the country had neither the resources to fully meet the demand for higher education nor the ability to provide employment to those who graduated from it. The expansion of higher education should therefore, the Commission argued, be synchronized with the manpower needs of the economy (Government of India 1970: vol. 2, p. xiv). The second recommendation was received with outrage in the Parliament, with the Dalit leader Jagjivan Ram threatening to go on a satygraha if the government chose to implement this elitist and anti-democratic idea. The National Policy on Education (1968) prepared by the next committee on education forbore from following up on the recommendations of the Kothari

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Commission. It sidestepped the question of selective admissions and, in lieu of the creation of major universities, recommended that promising university departments be upgraded, with additional funding, as Centres for Advanced Studies. Meanwhile, the proliferation of universities, colleges, and professional institutions continued apace through the 1970s and 1980s with political patronage. In consonance with the greater emphasis on primary education at this time, there were fewer higher education institutions set up by the government—Union or State—in this period, but a large number of privately funded institutions were established, many of them offering professional education such as medicine or engineering. Unrestrained expansion meant that facilities and infrastructure were often very poor and academic quality received little or no consideration. This abundantly manifest deterioration in standards led the Janata Government to reconsider and then jettison its promise to restore to the State List the subject of education which had been moved to the Concurrent List (Entry 25) by Indira Gandhi’s 42nd Constitutional Amendment. The same phenomenon of the proliferation of large numbers of substandard institutions of higher education, with the backing of wealthy politicians, was once again addressed, though equally ineffectually, by the next National Policy on Education (1986) (henceforth, NPE 1990). The fact that this policy was minted in the modernizing regime of Rajiv Gandhi led to greater hopes being invested in it, but little was achieved other than some institutional tinkering, including the renaming of the Ministry of Education in 1985 as the Ministry of Human Resource Development.5 The policy reaffirmed the view that it had become difficult to maintain academic standards due to the large numbers of colleges and universities that had been set up by the state governments without prior consultation with the UGC which, it said, ‘is in no position to control this situation’ (NPE 1990 [1986], 194). Its response to the problem of affiliating colleges, which had now become quite substantial, was to propose autonomous colleges, but this made little headway. Echoing the Kothari Commission’s position that the promotion of quality required that admission be more selective, at least at the doctoral level, it was candid in its assessment of the situation: Pressures for opening new colleges and universities being very intense, and the political system reacting to such pressures in different ways, in

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different states, it would only be appropriate for the Government to re-examine the feasibility of national level statutory mechanism for strongly discouraging non-standard/sub-standard colleges and universities being established. In the process of this examination, no doubt, the Central Government should have necessary prior consultations with the State Governments. (NPE 1990 [1986], 195)

Succeeding commissions have similarly acknowledged the manifold difficulties of university governance on account of politicization. The National Knowledge Commission (Government of India 2009) asked for the ‘entirely non-academic interventions from outside’ to be recognized and addressed systematically not only within universities but also in legislatures, political parties, and governments. ‘The autonomy of universities is eroded by interventions from governments and intrusions from political processes. This must be stopped’ (Government of India 2009, 69; emphasis added). The trend identified by the Rudolphs—that education came to be politicized in the post-colonial period as a result of the introduction of democracy—only got consolidated in subsequent years, when expansion was politically driven and massification got reinvented as a metaphor for inclusion and democratization. However, an important and enduring continuity with the colonial period, one that did not disappear with the coming of democracy and endures into the present, is the unique relationship of higher education and the state. The modern Indian university has, from its inception in colonial times to the present day, been viewed as properly yoked to the state project of the moment. This was signalled, in the Rudolphs’ work, as the third type of the education–politics relationship, namely the assertion, by the state, of a public interest in education. Over time, this got articulated as bureaucratization, with deleterious consequences for autonomy.

2. The State’s Assertion of the Public Interest in Education Higher education was the subject of the very first commission of independent India—the University Education Commission, better known as the Radhakrishnan Commission of 1948–9 (Mathew 2016, 41). Its report, as well as the Education Commission Report of 1964–6 (popularly referred to as the Kothari Commission Report), expressed the aspiration that higher education would be an instrument of national

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transformation, of social progress as much as of economic development. Every subsequent major commission on education, right up to the most recent National Policy on Education 2016 (prepared by a committee headed by T. S. R. Subramanian), has sought to harness universities to state projects of, variously, constitutional values, nationbuilding, promoting socio-economic mobility, and the creation of a twenty-first century knowledge society. It is only the particular state project to which universities were hitched that has changed from time to time, not the fact of such a harness, much less the legitimacy that attaches to it. Frequently, however, this close association of the state and the academy has taken less noble form. Increasingly, appointments to leadership positions in research institutions and universities went to individuals perceived as being close to the government. This resulted in a relationship of mutual benefit: academics seeking government patronage for the advancement of their careers withheld criticism on the grounds of protecting the secular or progressive or otherwise worthy agenda of the ruling party from opposition. Conversely, governments sought legitimacy from academics, especially in their opinion-shaping role as public intellectuals. In some states, there was no question of getting even a lecturer-level university appointment without demonstrable political affinity. But there is a deeper structural sense in which the heavy hand of the educational bureaucracy has always hovered over the university, and indeed every other level of education. This is a function of the Napoleonic model of the university adopted early on, in which everything from faculty recruitment, pay-grades, leave rules, and security of tenure to mechanisms for promotion in the academic hierarchy are governed by the same principles as those for civil servants. This search for parity between university teachers and government servants is a colonial legacy dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. University and college teachers, therefore, felt that the principle of promotion for them should be the same as that for government servants, namely, that a university or college teacher once appointed should be able to rise in the hierarchy without any hindrance. This point came up every time salary scales were revised—each time, they were revised simultaneously with those of government servants. While the teachers argued for improved parity, bureaucrats disagreed. This led to agitations

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by teachers’ unions, which in turn led to negotiations with ministers and other politicians, with due mediation from some ‘distinguished’ professors. Whatever the outcome, the principle of linkage with government servants was never given up; neither teachers nor the government thought of comparing teachers with workers in other sectors of society. (Shah 2013 [2005], 187)

Perhaps the most extraordinary instance of this parity is a new UGC notification which states that wherever the rules of their own institutions are silent, teachers in central universities would be governed by Civil Service Conduct Rules. An idea that has been intermittently revived from the colonial past, and finds approving iteration in the Subramanian Committee Report (2016), is that of the Indian Education Service, an all-India service with the Ministry of Human Resource Development as its cadre controlling authority. The purpose of this seems chiefly to be to create a cadre of officials who have expertise in the management of higher education, and can occupy high-level policymaking positions, but there is an alarming reference in the report to such persons being deployed in ‘teaching or managerial positions’ (Government of India 2016, 55; emphasis added). This mimics, in ways that could not be further from the academic enterprise, the structure of the bureaucracy and its underlying assumption that university teachers are, like in any other bureaucratic cadre, infinitely substitutable for each other. The idea of a cadre conveys the implicit assumption that a historian of ancient India should as easily be able to teach the history of modern China; that academics are not part of a research ecosystem that attracts research students based on the faculty’s specialization; that topics for PhD degrees can be handed down by a state secretariat. Precisely such an assumption informs the directive of the Government of Gujarat, prescribing a set of 82 topics for every university in the state to ensure that doctoral students write their PhD theses on at least five of these. The topics include: ‘Comparative Study of Sardar Patel Awas Yojana and Indira Awas Yojana’; ‘Gujarat: Good Governance for Growth, Scientific Management and Development—A Critical Study of Existing Pattern [sic] and Future Course—A Policy Suggestions [sic]’; and ‘Mutual Cooperation Among States’ Action Plans and Comparative Analysis of Strategies for Development—A Gujarat Model’ (Times of

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India, 26 April 2016). It is hard to think of a policy decision that is more indicative of not just a lack of academic autonomy but also a complete lack of understanding of what academic institutions do.6 The phenomenon of state control is arguably most starkly illustrated in the appointment of vice chancellors. In public universities, they are appointed by the government, which means these are usually political decisions. In federally funded universities, the appointments of vice chancellors are finalized in the Ministry of Human Resource Development and approved by the president as visitor, in which capacity s/he also nominates chancellors and members to the governing bodies of universities, such as the court, the academic council, the executive council, as well as nominees to selection panels for faculty recruitment. In state universities, it is the governor of the state government who plays this role. Here, vice chancellors’ appointments are often intensely politicized and manipulated, in some places reportedly even secured through corrupt means. While successive committees have mentioned the need to reform the system of appointment of vice chancellors, not one of them has suggested that VCs should be chosen or elected by faculty as heads of universities in many countries are. As the T.S.R. Subramanian Committee (2016) acknowledged: Technically a university is autonomous; it is not a Government institution, nor a grant-in-aid institution. In reality, Governments exercise extensive control. Vice-Chancellors are invariably nominees of Government, more often than not politically acceptable. By law Government appoints several nominees on the Syndicate and Senate; statutes and ordinances need to have government approval. Since these universities depend almost entirely on funding from Government, even in academic matters they have no real autonomy as no new course can be started or faculty position created without approval of State Finance authorities. (Government of India 2016, 129)

Nevertheless, the committee lamented that while vice chancellors of yore had stature, wisdom, and scholarship, ‘[u]nfortunately, one cannot easily identify people of such outstanding calibre, in general, in the Indian universities’ (Government of India 2016, 125). It even recorded that it was informally told about the ‘going rate’ for vice-chancellorships. It appears not to have been informed about the fact that it is not uncommon for teaching positions at every level to be ‘bought’ and ‘sold’.

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Patronage, nepotism, and even corruption are common features of university appointments, especially in state universities, which account for 85 per cent of the total number of publicly funded universities in the country. In the states, even the recruitment of teachers for government colleges is done—if and when it is done at all, given the large numbers of vacant positions—directly by state public service commissions who use their punitive powers of disciplining teachers by treating them as transferable employees. Little wonder, then, that the higher education sector is plagued by litigation.7 Political interference by state governments in universities is almost accepted as natural, as is the expectation that faculty recruitments will be made in accordance with the ideological orientation of the party forming the government in the state. In general, the incentives to conform are considerable. In the last few years, the demand for conformity has taken the form of negative sanctions for the exercise of academic freedom. The clampdown on academic freedom during the present tenure of the NDA government has been quite unparalleled, and of a kind previously seen only during the period of the Emergency. The freedom to research and publish has been curtailed by court cases against scholarly works on the grounds that they are ‘anti-Hindu’ or ‘anti-national’; freedom inside and outside the classroom is curtailed by the use of goon squads who prevent students and faculty from speaking on issues such as Kashmir or from staging plays on sexual violence; and extra-mural freedom is constrained as when academics, researching in areas where the Maoist (Naxalite) movement has been active, are targeted with police action. Academics have been suspended from universities simply for speaking up on issues that offend the Hindu right. The killing of the ‘rationalist’ scholar and former vice chancellor M. M. Kalburgi is of course the most outrageous of all. None of these incidents were directed or instigated by state agencies, but all of them represent situations where right-wing elements have been emboldened by the promise of impunity and the protection of the ruling party, whether at the level of the state or central government. This protection, and even ideological approval, has been loudly proclaimed by ruling party Members of Parliament and even ministers. Perhaps the best-known example of this was the impassioned speech, delivered in the Lok Sabha, by the then minister for Human Resource Development, Smriti Irani, defending the arrest of students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University on grounds of their ‘anti-national’ and

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‘seditious’ activities. The prime minister himself tweeted the link to the video of her speech with the words ‘Do hear this speech by Smriti Irani’ (Ashraf 2016). The appropriateness of running universities like departments of state has, apart from the sorts of excesses mentioned in the previous paragraph, never come in for serious questioning because it is commonly assumed that public funding mandates such control. The idea of accountability is thus interpreted as a partisan political principle rather than as a broader idea that invokes the public interest, making it difficult to strike a balance between public funding and academic autonomy. For the most part, universities are accountable to the UGC, which is the source or channel of government funding to them.

The University Grants Commission: From Regulation to Intervention In a seminal article published in 2001, the Rudolphs had argued that, following the economic reforms and an era of hung parliaments, India had transitioned from a centralized interventionist state to a decentralized regulatory state. This shift was signified, they said, in the new and independent regulatory role being performed by the Supreme Court, the Election Commission, and the presidency. The role of regulatory institutions, in their words, is ‘more procedural than substantive, more rule-making and enforcing than law-making and policy-making’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001, 129). Notwithstanding the various anxieties about the direction in which the economic reforms propelled higher education in India, the role of the UGC suggests an opposite movement, and one that is not entirely synchronous with the economic reforms. It must be clarified that the UGC was, even to begin with, only one of many bodies charged with the regulation of higher education. More than a dozen professional bodies—such as the All India Council for Technical Education, the Bar Council of India, the Medical Council of India, the Indian Council of Medical Research, the Institute of Chartered Accountants—have statutory status to determine standards for education imparted in these fields. Indeed, the ICAR, the MCI and the AICTE (with non-statutory status from 1946 to 1988) predate the UGC by several years, and even decades. In general, the University Grants Commission was given more

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expansive powers than such bodies typically have. It was charged not only with channelling funding to universities, but was mandated also to take steps ‘as it may think fit for the promotion and co-ordination of University education and for the determination and maintenance of standards of teaching, examination and research in Universities’ (UGC Act 1956: ch. 3, sec. 12). Indeed, when the Draft UGC Bill was being debated at a conference of vice chancellors in 1952, the latter mounted strong opposition to it, on the grounds that it was for the universities, rather than an external agency, to regulate and maintain academic standards. In fact, to have an external agency doing this would be a violation of university autonomy (Singh 2004, 34). These are wide and encompassing powers which were however not used judiciously. The literature on higher education is rife with lamentation about the weakness of the UGC, its failure to discipline universities that violated its own norms and even control fake universities,8 and its failure to coordinate higher education in accordance with its legislative mandate. In its earlier phase, the UGC laboured under multiple limitations: some of these were statutory while others stemmed from its acquiescence in the role of junior partner of the Ministry. In statutory terms, the UGC was, as already mentioned, constrained insofar as the law did not make it mandatory to obtain its approval for the establishment of colleges and universities. Indeed, in the states, not just the UGC, even universities were not required to be consulted on the establishment of new colleges. The state government alone was the deciding authority, and so the chief dispenser of patronage for politico-educational entrepreneurs. This was obviously a mutually beneficial relationship as it provided ample opportunities for rent-seeking. As dysfunctional state universities—more or less teaching shops adhering to not even the most minimal standards—proliferated, with state government support, the UGC has made a virtue of leaving the universities to act on their own. Not only that, non-intervention has been elevated into a principle.9 It can be nobody’s contention that the UGC ought to lay down the law as far as the universities are concerned. … At the same time, it is equally wrong to let every university function as if it were a law unto itself. (Singh 2004, 45–6)

While the dominant narrative blames the UGC for inertia, the role of the government of the day is typically under-emphasized, as are the

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various ways in which, over time, its authority was diminished both externally and internally. Externally, its authority was substantively eroded by the statutory status given, in 1987, to the AICTE (the All India Council for Technical Education). It has been argued that the privatization of technical education, in particular, was encouraged and even mediated by the economic reforms inaugurated in 1991, which coincided with the inauguration of a centralized licensing regime (Krishnan 2014). The simultaneous rise of the information technology industry encouraged the establishment of a large number of private engineering colleges especially in southern and western India (Krishnan 2014).10 The All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) was transformed from its earlier status as an advisory body to a central regulatory agency vested with statutory powers to license private technical and management institutions, set quality standards and stipulate the fees that could be charged by them. Vested with statutory powers, the AICTE no longer worked to stimulate the provision of technical education such that, it has been argued, the growth that took place in the 1990s and the noughties occurred despite rather than because of it (Ayyar 2017, 87–8). This was because the number of institutions it needed to oversee was enormous, and much larger than the number of institutions over which the UGC exercised oversight. The AICTE re-invented the ‘licensepermit-control raj’, with the predictable accompaniments of arbitrary decision-making and rent-seeking behaviour. Its inspections were a well-known farce, with the faculty and equipment moving from a justinspected institution to the one next in line to be inspected, and with the cooperation of vendors who ‘loaned’ equipment and books that would impress the inspection team (Ayyar 2017, 261). In 2009, just two decades after it had acquired statutory status, the Chairman and Member-Secretary of the AICTE were arrested on charges of corruption (‘Bribery’ 2009). Its functioning in these two decades had the effect of centralizing the patronage flows hitherto exercised by state governments. The politics of caste and community continued to receive patronage, but in a situation of declining public expenditure on higher education,11 this took the form of the grant of licenses rather than funds. Over time, the ‘infinitely flexible’ (Ayyar 2016, 384) approach of the AICTE led to the IT industry and ‘self-financing’ engineering colleges, being locked in a happy and mutually beneficial embrace. In Andhra Pradesh, for example, Chief

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Minister Chandrababu Naidu persuaded Microsoft to set up offices in Hyderabad, and simultaneously began facilitating the setting up of engineering colleges. From approximately 20 engineering colleges in the state when he assumed the Chief Ministership, there were 220 by the time Naidu completed his tenure. In accomplishing this goal, and being in a political alliance with the ruling party, he could prevail upon the central government and the AICTE to assist him in getting the requisite permissions (Mathew 2017, 4). The political economy of the development of the IT industry and its linkages with the engineering college industry could not have been anticipated by the Rudolphs. But the phenomenon they had identified in its early stages certainly gathered much momentum in the years that followed, as politicization intermingled with commercialization and a by all accounts listless regulator, the UGC. The non-performance of the UGC on its originally controversial and resented mandate of determining and maintaining academic standards led to the formation of the National Academic Accreditation Council (NAAC) which performs the inspectional role originally assigned to the UGC. This has been another source of the erosion of the UGC’s authority. Indeed, Amrik Singh went so far as to say that after the NAAC came on to the scene, ‘there was very little left for the UGC to do. In plain words, it can be said that NAAC is doing what the UGC had not done earlier’ (Singh 2009, 57). Over the last decade and a half, and even as it has remained ‘the implementing arm of the MHRD [Ministry of Human Resource Development]’ (Kumar 2018, 15), there has been a steady accretion of power in the UGC. The thesis of the weakness, inertia and incapacity of this regulatory body, averred by many from the Rudolphs to Amrik Singh, seems to be in need of revision. From having been an inert and ineffectual regulator, the UGC today is actively interventionist. How did this accretion of power occur? Inadvertently. Like several other states, Chhattisgarh enacted a law for establishing private universities. In less than a year, the Ajit Jogi government in that state had notified 97 private universities, many of which were later found to be one-room outfits, selling degrees with names like Masters in Cheminformatics. In response to this, and at the behest of the MHRD, the UGC issued a set of regulations called the UGC (Establishment of and Maintenance of Standards in Private Universities) Regulations, 2003. Ruling on the

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writ petition filed by Professor Yash Pal (Yash Pal and Another v State of Chhattisgarh and Others, 2005), the Supreme Court upheld the UGC’s new regulations as the appropriate framework for setting up a private university. This has been interpreted as having ‘marked the metamorphosis of the UGC from an ineffective regulatory organisation into a powerful [sic] whose regulations bind even State Legislatures and State Governments, not to speak of universities’ (Ayyar 2017, 312). From being a body that was too weak to enforce even its own regulations, the UGC became a Leviathan that was too powerful to be resisted by universities. Even if the UGC’s exercise of its enormous powers—to determine standards of teaching and research and maintain them—was initially desultory and even disinterested, it has latterly become more energetic in its appetite for exacting conformity and even unquestioning obedience from Universities, and to imposing centralized, homogenizing bureaucratic control over their day-to-day functioning. Characterizing this as ‘sarkarikaran’, Pankaj Chandra claims this control has become debilitating, as it ‘hampers the main activity of the University—that is, learning’ (Chandra 2017, 100). The UGC has not only formulated model syllabi to create curricular uniformity, it has also begun to energetically exercise its power to license new programmes and decree the suspension of existing ones. It conducts a centralized examination for research funding for doctoral students and, in a precipitate move towards audit culture, has also developed quantifiable matrices for evaluating the quality of faculty to judge fitness for recruitment and promotion. This standardization of criteria for faculty recruitment is tightly governed by a set of regulations enunciated (but also frequently and whimsically rewritten) by the UGC. In an attempt to control arbitrary appointments, the UGC evolved a qualifying examination, the National Entrance Test (NET), a standardized objective-choice test which determines eligibility for candidates applying for an Assistant Professorship/ Lectureship in a college or university. Despite the fact that the questions asked in the examination are rather like those in a quiz competition, testing memory rather than analytical or scholarly abilities, the success rate of those who pass the NET examination is between 5 and 6 per cent of those who take the test. Faculty promotions—under a programme called the Career Advancement Scheme which, modelled on the promotion structure

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within government, specifies the minimum number of years that a faculty member has to spend at every level of the academic ladder—are now governed by a calculation of their performance on a set of Academic Performance Indicators (API), that include research and publications.12 No sooner had the API been implemented that new ways of gaming the system emerged. The phenomenon of predatory journals is known across the world. India has the dubious distinction of having the largest number of predatory journals in the world (Bhattacharya 2018). The API system triggered the invention of the phenomenon of predatory or fraudulent conferences as well, convened especially to procure certificates and tot up points that can strengthen a promotion application. Meanwhile, the UGC issued its own list of acceptable journals, which were shown to include some predatory journals. These are particularly useful for the fulfilment of one of the UGC’s recent regulations for the award of the PhD degree—that every doctoral candidate must have one publication in a listed journal before submission of the thesis. Such publication is now available, and at a very quick turnaround time, for a modest fee. In a damage control exercise, the UGC has claimed recently that it has purged its list of predatory journals, but there is a great deal of contention and disagreement about what has been excised and what remains. The UGC is now an extremely powerful regulator, working in sync with, and no doubt deriving its disciplinary powers from, the government of the day. It exercises punitive powers over both public and private universities—the most recent example of which was its withdrawal of recognition for the Four Year Undergraduate Bachelor’s degree, both in the University of Delhi13 as well as in the new liberal arts private universities. Its governance of Central Universities has taken the form of a series of regulations, each substituting and sometimes contradicting the preceding one.14 In recent years, this one-way communication of directives has acquired an almost farcical form, with regular communiqués to universities asking them to observe Yoga Day; to organise events to celebrate one or other personality from Tamil poets to Swami Vivekananda; and to undertake activities to promote organ donation (Kalra 2016). The ‘New UGC’ (Ayyar 2017, 313), then, has travelled in a direction opposite to that documented, in 2001, by the Rudolphs for state institutions. Even as it has become more assertive of its enormous powers,

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what has arguably remained constant is its relationship with the MHRD. The Rudolphs had speculated as to whether the UGC could provide a buffer to universities against the Ministry. Not only has the UGC not played that role, in both its non-interventionist phase, as well as in its current proactively interventionist phase, the UGC has been, and remains, a docile junior partner of the MHRD. The distinction that the Rudolphs made between the UGC and the government has collapsed (as surely as their implicit distinction between governmental influence and political influence), with the former becoming a mere instrument of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, a department of state like any other. Today, contra the Rudolphs, neither government nor UGC can be viewed as protectors of university autonomy, but together the primary sources of its erosion. Ironically, the regulatory body that gained the most from the economic reforms was the AICTE, but once again, liberalization became an excuse to reinvent the license-permit raj associated with extant dirigisme policies. *** As the preceding pages have argued, university autonomy in India has been a casualty of heavy-handed bureaucratic control. When the University Grants Commission Act was under debate, the Minister for Education, Humayun Kabir, reassured Vice Chancellors concerned about their loss of autonomy, that the government had no intention of encroaching upon the autonomy of universities, and that all that was contemplated was uniformity in standards, definitely not uniformity in courses and syllabi (Singh 2004, 37). A recent example of centralized control and micro-regulation was the attempt, through a notification in 2015, to impose a centrally determined common minimum curriculum for 47 Central Universities.15 The justification was to allow for mobility through credit transfer across universities, but the effect was mindless uniformity as it provided for the UGC to prescribe syllabi and course curricula, with universities being permitted to deviate from these to the extent of a mere 20 per cent. Despite a promising start immediately after independence, an official ambivalence about autonomy has progressively become visible. The contrast between the conception of autonomy found in the first (Radhakrishnan) Report (1948–9) and the most recent (Subramanian)

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Report (2016) could not be starker. The first report described ‘exclusive control of education by the state’ as an attribute of totalitarian tyrannies, and said that while higher education was undoubtedly a state obligation, ‘State aid is not to be confused with State control over academic policies and practices. Intellectual progress demands the maintenance of the spirit of free inquiry’ (Government of India 1962, 42). Compare this with the conception found in the 2016 Report of the Committee for the Evolution of the New Education Policy (three out of four of whose members, and its Chairman, were predictably retired bureaucrats). The report points to the need to restrict ‘political and other distractions’ on campuses, and expresses concern about the balance between free speech and freedom of association, keeping in view the ‘primary purpose’ for which universities have been established. Lord Curzon’s insistence on reducing university autonomy and increasing government control over universities to protect them from nationalist politics and politicians gets a fresh lease of life here, though in conjunction with a new approach to education that could be described as techno-managerial: The present evaluation methods are input based, rather than realistically based on outputs or potential outputs. … Equally importantly for institutions adjudged as ‘quality’, much greater freedom has to be given in terms of determination of student fees, or faculty salaries. In short, the new management paradigm should encourage quality by offering total autonomy; should discourage the poor managements with appropriate checks and controls; equally, when an institution is assessed to be below minimal standards, it should be closed down without ado. (Government of India 2016, 134–5)

Globally, the academy is wrestling with the twinning of autonomy and accountability in a neo liberal framework (Strathern 2000). The understanding of autonomy in the preceding quote also finds its twin in recent government reports. While designing systems of accountability that safeguard academic autonomy is sadly not a task that has been attempted by any Commission on education, and even as it acknowledged that accountability should not be confused with control by the state, the National Knowledge Commission determined that ‘the essential objective of accountability to society must be to empower students to take decisions rather than simply increase the power of the state. … We need to create systems that enable students, or their parents,

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to choose between and assess universities’ (Government of India 2009, 74). This comes disturbingly close to the contemporary view, in many countries, of faculty as being providers of education and students as consumers of it (Williams 2013). It is definitely at odds with the question posed by Kuldeep Mathur to universities: ‘how do you produce an argumentative Indian?’ (Mathur 2017). How the tension between autonomy and accountability is negotiated is ultimately a test of the idea of a University in a society. The question of whether autonomy should remain restricted to the freedom of designing curricula or whether it must also include the freedom to speak truth to power without being disciplined, are questions that are presently the subject of contention and struggle on campuses. These are, however, arguably questions that cannot be settled in the absence of a societal consensus on the more fundamental question of what a university is for. This absence perhaps explains why public universities in India are not, and have never been, autonomous. Their primary function has, since colonial times, been seen as the transmission of knowledge and the certification that such knowledge has been duly transmitted. The Indian university has increasingly and exclusively become a source of credentialization for a society in which certification matters more than what is learned. How horribly wrong an exclusive focus on, indeed obsession with, credentialization can go is indicated by the mismatch between the employment market and college degrees.16 When governments (of all stripes, in this particular respect) put forward a plan for making universities ‘world-class’, they offer autonomy as a carrot. The assumption that not every university deserves autonomy implies that autonomy is not an integral requirement for the academic enterprise, and is akin to saying that not every human flourishing requires rights and liberties. The new autonomy provisions—the freedom to start new courses, the freedom to hire foreign faculty at differential salaries, the freedom to start skill development centres, the freedom to run open distance learning programmes, and so forth— will function within the full ambit of the UGC, except that these new initiatives will not be funded by the UGC. In other words, the freedom to start new initiatives (whether these are desirable or exciting or not being another matter) actually entails the raising of resources from outside. This is one source of the resistance of the teachers’ movement:

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that autonomy is a pathway to privatization, as the universities so rewarded would be encouraged to seek funding from private sources. The other is the legitimate concern that autonomy without academic freedom is meaningless (Bhattacharya and Ramdev 2018). Close to 50 years after the publication of the Rudolphs’ book on education and politics, and despite the much denser landscape of higher education that obtains today, their insights continue to resonate in important ways. The exercise of political influence—in the creation and everyday functioning of colleges and universities—has been both normalized and universalized. What may not have been perceptible at the time the Rudolphs were writing, is the difficulty of disentangling political and governmental influence. Governmental interventions in the states have long had a partisan quality; this is increasingly so even at the central level, and the Rudolphs did recognize the complexities induced by the federal structure, even though their book predates the relocation of education from the State List to the Concurrent List. As we have noted, commission after commission has reiterated the desirability of protecting university autonomy from the intrusions of the political process and from governmental intervention, but to no avail. The UGC, despite its displacement by competing agencies like the AICTE and the NAAC, has become more interventionist and energetic, in the exercise of its disciplinary powers, than it was when the Rudolphs were writing. As a handmaiden of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, it has become the instrument of centralizing and uniformizing initiatives designed to strike at the very roots of university autonomy and creativity. Looking ahead, the official narrative of autonomy gives little confidence, as it is selective in its application, substantially empty of content, designed to encourage private funding for new programmes, and devoid of any consideration to the question of academic freedom.

Endnotes The research for this article has been supported by a UPE-II Grant from the Jawaharlal Nehru University. 1. The Rudolphs also discussed the ‘outputs’ of higher education, naming their discussion as ‘“standards” in democratized higher education’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 35–50). Candidly questioning the decline thesis, arguing

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that standards were not so high in the past either, they remarked the limitation stemming from the paucity of data. This would be equally limiting today for anyone trying to use quantitative data to comment on standards of research output in India, because ‘Quantity’, as the Rudolphs wrote, ‘tells nothing about quality’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 38). Nevertheless, they painstakingly compiled and interpreted the data on PhDs in India, which universities they were produced in, and in which disciplines; the rising student-staff ratios with their implications for a fall in standards; and arrived at the overall conclusion that while postgraduate education had improved since Independence, undergraduate education had suffered. They also noted the shift away from arts degrees, which had become less prestigious due to their demonstrable association with low-ranking clerical jobs, to science degrees and, in both these spheres, the emergence of new specialized areas for postgraduate work. They disputed Edward Shils’s argument that the reference groups of Indian academics were entirely in the West, arguing that Indian reference groups had gained in competence and stature since (Rudolph and Rudolph 1972, 45). 2. The two commissions on education that had been constituted and completed their reports up until this time were the Education Commissions of 1948 (chaired by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan) and of 1964–6 (chaired by D.S. Kothari). 3. At a later stage, the setting up of new self-financed engineering colleges and polytechnics became the focus of competitive politics in Tamil Nadu between the DMK and the AIADMK, clashing over whether technical education should be prioritized over general education (Mathew 2016, 8). 4. For some years now, governments have been concerned about India’s absence from the rankings of universities. The arrival of Chinese institutions in these rankings has only added to this anxiety. The government has announced plans to provide additional funds to 10 public and 10 private universities so that they can develop into Institutions of Eminence and find a place on the league tables of the world. The desire to realize the governmental dream (or fantasy) of ‘world class’ universities in India is thus currently underway, with a committee of entirely expatriate academics having been constituted to confer the status of Institutions of Eminence. 5. The changed nomenclature reflected a shift to a managerial conception of education in which people came to be redesignated as human capital and human resources. This was in keeping with the World Bank’s emphasis on human capital as a determinant of economic development. 6. At a more fundamental level, many states—from West Bengal to Karnataka—have, in the last few years, proposed amendments to the laws governing universities, in a manner that cedes greater control over universities to the elected state government.

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7. In their study of Supreme Court cases on higher education, Devesh Kapur and Madhav Khosla have analysed the trends in a list of 507 judgments delivered between 1950 and 2009. They estimate that, in the first three decades after Independence, the Supreme Court adjudicated 1.5 cases annually related to higher education; in the decade 2000–9, this had increased to 20.6 cases annually (2017, 209–10). These figures, of course, do not account for the (literally) innumerable cases in the high courts and district courts across the length and breadth of India. 8. Amrik Singh cites the example of a fake (unnamed) university that came into existence even before the UGC did. The UGC failed to take action against this university at a time when the fine was just Rs 1000. The fine is now Rs 1 crore, and though the UGC eventually filed a case against this university, it continues to function (2004, 15). 9. This has some resonance with the idea of ‘manifest appropriation’ proposed by the Rudolphs in an essay reinterpreting Weber’s theory of bureaucracy, authority, and power (Rudolph and Rudolph 1979, 214). In the absence of an organizational micro-ethnography, we can only speculate that what prevented the UGC from being more interventionist was the pulls and pressures from the ministry and even from powerful regional politicians of the ruling party. 10. In Karnataka, for instance, the number of engineering colleges went up from 35 in the 1980s to 239 by 2012–13. 11. Public expenditure on education saw a shift of priority, in this period, towards the goal of universal elementary education to the neglect of higher education. This has been attributed to the emphasis on poverty and basic needs economics by Ayyar (2017, 84) and to the influence of the World Bank by Tilak (2013, 4). 12. The establishment, after Independence, of a variety of standalone research institutions, in not just science and technology but also in the social sciences, entrenched the dominant view that research takes place in institutions other than universities, and that universities are places where teaching is done, examinations are conducted, and degrees are awarded—all of these functions performed by state personnel called faculty—but not where the production of knowledge takes place. The introduction of research and publication as a formal requirement for recruitment and advancement in the university hierarchy is a relatively recent phenomenon that has, in both design and implementation, ill-served the objective. Official data for 2015 show that while 78 per cent of higher education institutions are private, accounting for 67 per cent of the total enrolment, 70 per cent of all PhD enrolments are in the public universities— central, state, as well as the Institutes of National Importance. Only 19 per cent are in private universities or deemed universities. In percentage terms, the PhDs awarded constitute 0.071 per cent of the total enrolment. The popular

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conception of the university as chiefly a source of credentialization cannot and does not encourage a vision of a space where knowledge is advanced through research. 13. The University of Delhi launched a Four-Year Undergraduate Programme in 2013, which was protested by teachers’ and students’ organizations. In June 2014, shortly after the change of government at the centre, the UGC directed the university to roll back the programme. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (student wing of the RSS) was among the student organizations that had loudly protested the FYUP and, having petitioned the minister for Human Resources Development on the subject, it projected the roll back as a victory. 14. For example, UGC Regulations 2010 and UGC Regulations 2016. 15. See, for reference, C. Padmanabhan (2016, 20). 16. This was flagged, as we have noted, by the first two education commissions which were attacked for their elitism. It has led to farcical and even tragic situations such as that of the advertisement, in 2015, for 368 office boys (called peons in India) in the Uttar Pradesh secretariat, for which 25,000 people with postgraduate qualifications applied, 250 of which held PhDs (The Hindustan Times, 17 September 2015, available at https://www. hindustantimes.com/india/phd-holders-among-23-lakh-applicants-for-peonjobs-in-up/story-OqHzHbvo16gUN2DfTkfYlI.html, last accessed on 15 May 2019). In January 2018, 281,000 people were reported to have applied for 738 positions of peons in the state of Madhya Pradesh, including many holding MBAs and engineering or law degrees (‘People with MBA’, The Times of India, 29 January 2018).

References Ashraf, Ajaz. 2016. ‘Smriti Irani Alone Cannot Be Blamed for Modi Govt.’s Troubles at JNU, HCU’. FirstPost, 7 July. Available at https://www.firstpost. com/politics/smriti-irani-alone-cannot-be-blamed-for-modi-govts-troublesat-jnu-hcu-2877464.html. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. Ayyar, R. V. Vaidyanatha. 2017. History of Education Policymaking in India 1947– 2016. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Bhattacharya, Debaditya, and Rina Ramdev. 2018. ‘Autonomy in Higher Education: A Trojan Horse for Privatization’. The Wire, 23 March. Available at https://thewire.in/education/autonomy-in-higher-education-a-trojanhorse-for-privatisation. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. ‘Bribery Scandal at AICTE’. The Telegraph India. 16 July 2009. Available at https://www.telegraphindia.com/1090717/jsp/nation/story_11248270.jsp. Last accessed on 25 February 2020.

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Chandra, Pankaj. 2017. Building Universities That Matter: Where Are Indian Institutions Going Wrong? Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. Elliott, Carolyn. 1972. ‘The Problem of Autonomy: The Osmania University Case’. In Education and Politics in India: Studies in Organization, Society and Policy, edited by Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, 273–309. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Government of India. 1962. The Report of the University Education Commission (December 1948–August 1949). Vol. 1. New Delhi: Ministry of Education. ———. 1970. Education and National Development: Report of the Education Commission, 1964–66. Vols. 1 and 2. New Delhi: National Council of Educational Research and Training. ———. 1990. Report of the Committee for Review of National Policy on Education 1986: Final Report. New Delhi. Available at https://www.educationforallinindia.com/1990%20Acharya%20Ramamurti%20Report.pdf. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. ———. 2009. National Knowledge Commission: Report to the Nation 2006–2009. New Delhi. Available at https://www.aicte-india.org/downloads/nkc.pdf. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. ———. 2016. Report of the Committee for Evolution of the New Education Policy. Chairman: T.S.R. Subramanian, National Policy on Education. New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development. ———. 2019. All India Survey on Higher Education (2018–19). New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resource Development. Kaul, Rekha. 1993. Caste, Class and Education: Politics of the Capitation Fee Phenomenon in Karnataka. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Kalra, Aparna. 2019. ‘The UGC Is More about Control and Less about Regulation’. Scroll.in, 24 November 2016. Available at https://scroll.in/article/821824/ the-ugc-is-more-about-control-and-less-about-regulation. Last accessed on 15 May 2019. Kapur, Devesh, and Madhav Khosla. 2017. ‘The Supreme Court and Private Higher Education: Litigation Patterns and Judicial Trends’. In Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education, edited by Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, 1–37. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. Kapur, Devesh, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. 2017. ‘Introduction’. In Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education, edited by Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, 1–37. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. Mathew, A. 2016. ‘Competitive Politics in Tamil Nadu Higher Education Policy’. The Indian Journal of Technical Education 39 (2): 1–18. ———. 2017. ‘Andhra’s Fee Reimbursement Scheme: Intended and Unintended Impact on Higher Education in AP and Telengana’. College Post, April–June.

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Available at https://seededu.org/pdf/Cover%20Apr-Jun%202017.pdf. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. Mathur, Kuldeep. 2017. ‘Changing Perspectives: Neo-Liberal Policy Reform and Education in India’. Foundation Day address at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi. 11 August. Padmanabhan, C. 2016. ‘Endangering Academic Autonomy’. Economic and Political Weekly 51 (5): 20–2. ‘People with MBA, LLBs Rush for Peons’ Job’. The Times of India, 29 January 2018. Available at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/people-withmba-llbs-rush-for-peons-job/articleshow/62687277.cms. Last accessed on 25 February 2020. Prasad, Anirudh. 2007. University Education Administration and the Law. New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications. Rudolph, Lloyd I., and Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 1972. Education and Politics in India: Studies in Organization, Society and Policy. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1979. ‘Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: A Revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy’. World Politics 31 (2): 195–227. ———. 2001. ‘Redoing the Constitutional Design: From an Interventionist to a Regulatory State’. In The Success of India’s Democracy, edited by Atul Kohli, 127–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, Amrik. 2004. Fifty Years of Higher Education in India: The Role of the University Grants Commission. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004. ———. 2009. Remaking Higher Education: Essays in Dissent. New Delhi: Harper Collins with India Today. Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Tilak, Jandhyala B.G. 2014. ‘Introduction’. In Higher Education in India: In Search of Equality, Quality and Quantity, edited by Jandhyala B.G. Tilak, 1–18. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. University Grants Commission. 2002. The University Grants Commmission Act, 1956 (modified up to the 20th December, 1985). New Delhi: University Grants Commission. Williams, Joanna. 2013. Consuming Higher Education: Why Learning Can’t Be Bought. London: Bloomsbury.

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Civil–Military Relations and Democratic Stability steven i. wilkinson

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ndia’s success in managing civil–military relations since 1947 deserves to be recognized as a major achievement. It is a success partly because, prior to 1947, many nationalists worried publicly whether democracy in an independent India could possibly survive with a ‘mercenary army’ staffed by British officers, Indian officers chosen by the British for their conservativism, and other ranks drawn disproportionately from the ‘martial classes’ of just a few provinces and regions. India’s success is also impressive by comparison with other colonies that won independence after World War II. In Ghana, Togo, Indonesia, Egypt, Burma, and many other states the military has had an important and sometimes dominant role in politics. Closer to home, of course, the army in Pakistan—which was carved out from the same Indian Army in 1947—has dominated Pakistani politics since the 1950s, including three long periods of direct military rule (1958–71, 1977–88, 1999–2008). The Rudolphs’ work, especially in an impressive 1964 article, highlighted four main reasons for this success: good initial decisions to manage civil–military relations in the first few years after 1947; inherited norms of professionalism and non-interference from the British; India’s limited international role, which meant the country was not drawn into conflicts that might raise the salience of the military; and the conflict-reducing potential of India’s federal system.

Steven I. Wilkinson, Civil–Military Relations and Democratic Stability. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190125011.003.0010

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In this chapter, I review their arguments in the light of other work on civil–military relations and recent developments in Indian politics. Like the Rudolphs, I agree that good initial management decisions on the army after Independence, and the federal conflict-management strategies employed in the 1950s (including the creation of linguistic states, and compromise on the issues of backward caste reservations) were key to reducing civil–military conflicts. I would also add one further factor: the much better legacies that the Indian state inherited compared to Pakistan. As Dr Ambedkar had foreseen, the secession of Pakistan saved India the massive fiscal expense of garrisoning the North-West Frontier, and also made the ethnic composition of the Indian Army much more equal than it would have been (though the Pakistan Army, now dominated by Punjabis and Pashtuns, became much more uneven). The ‘professional traditions’ argument, however, I think has much less merit, because, of course, it could equally be applied to many other British-trained militaries, from Ghana, to Egypt, to Burma, to Pakistan, which did have coups. Professionalism can also sometimes, as Samuel Finer pointed out as long ago as 1962, act as a spur to military intervention if senior officers feel they can only protect the country or the military as an institution by intervening in politics (1962, 20–5). If India’s generals had been confronted with similar foreign and domestic crises to those in Pakistan, it is not inconceivable that they might have contemplated a similar intervention. When the Rudolphs asked General Chaudhuri in 1963 what he thought about his former Sandhurst batchmate Ayub Khan’s coup in Pakistan, Chaudhuri told them that ‘he thought what must have happened was that Ayub Khan, finding Iskander Mirza playing ducks and drakes with the political situation in Pakistan had felt obliged to move in and “put things right”’.1 I would also downplay the international entanglement aspect in explaining India’s success. For one thing, neither the massive shock to the system of a major defeat by China in 1962 nor the major victory against Pakistan in December 1971 fundamentally changed the balance between India’s civilian and military leadership. For another, the fact that India is the dominant regional power, and also a nuclear-armed power (something the Rudolphs could not have predicted in 1964), means that it faces no existential threat of the kind that might—given the right set of conditions—provoke senior army officers to replace civilians in order to meet that threat.

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One worry, though, is that the federal conflict-management aspects of the policies introduced in the 1950s may be at risk, especially given the rise of a strong Hindu nationalist party that may want to reshape India’s polity and society in the coming decade. The example of the 1970s, however, the last time India faced such a dominant party, suggests that India’s robust party competition, and strong regional powers, will strongly resist any attempt to centralize the system and undo the settlements of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Rudolphs’ Work on Civil–Military Relations In 1964 the Rudolphs published an article titled ‘Generals and Politics in India’ in which they sought to answer the question of why India’s army had not been the obstacle to democracy that the army in Pakistan had been. This was their only piece of work completely focused on this question, though it made arguments on the importance of pre-Independence deals over the Indian National Army (INA), international nonalignment, and the value of federalism to which they later returned in their 1987 book Pursuit of Lakshmi and their 2010 article ‘Federalism as State Formation in India’.2 The 1964 article was explicitly comparative and theoretical, placing developments in India alongside the large number of works that had recently come out looking at civil military relations in new and developed democracies, such as William Gutteridge’s Armed Forces in New States (1962) and Samuel P. Huntington’s Soldier and the State (1957). The piece was impressively researched, reflecting interviews with a number of senior Indian politicians in the spring of 1963, including the new Defence Minister Y. B. Chavan, former Defence Minister Krishna Menon, Prime Minister Nehru, and other important Congress Party, Swatantra Party, and state-level political figures. The article also benefitted from off-the-record interviews with several serving and retired military officers.3 The Rudolphs shared their interview transcripts with me in 2013, so we now know the identities of those they interviewed—now all long dead—under the promise of anonymity. The most important of these interviews was an hour-long meeting with General J.H. Chaudhuri, the army chief from 1962 to 1966, and other key officers such as Lt. Gen Bahadur Singh, head of the National Defence College, and retired General Nathu Singh, who after General Cariappa had been the second most senior Indian officer at Independence.

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It is truly impressive that the Rudolphs were able to obtain such access to top leaders and conduct interviews on such sensitive topics as civil–military relations and the survival of democracy just a few short months after the disastrous Indo-China war of October-November 1962 and a very divisive period of army–government relations under Defence Minister Menon. It is a testament to their persistence, networks, and charm, and also of course to the relative openness of Nehru’s administration compared to those that came after. The Rudolphs carefully prepared for each interview, and Lloyd Rudolph wrote to me in 2013 describing the process. Susanne and I would read up on the person and the context we were interested in and then prepare a list of questions we might ask. We were not bound by these questions. The questions were meant to preclude getting answers of an obvious, descriptive and banal kind, i.e. they immediately showed we were ‘up’ on them and on the subject or subjects we were interested in. We did not refer to the list of questions during the interview. Instead, we tried to make the interview as much of a conversation as possible. Immediately after the interview we repaired to our car, a little Fiat, and recorded what we remembered with each taking turns talking to the tape recorder with freedom to interrupt each other.4

In their 1964 article and subsequent work the Rudolphs made four main arguments about India’s success in keeping the army out of politics. First, they argued that Congress had made some good decisions at the time of Independence regarding the military as an institution. Congress decided in 1946–7 not to purge the military of the senior Indian officers who had loyally served the Raj, which the Rudolphs argued would have ‘created a potentially subversive political class’, or to immediately try to dilute the conservatism of the army by adding more nationalist-oriented officers drawn from the Indian National Army (INA) or outside the army. ‘None of the INA’s “heroes” were retained as officers, a decision which not only cemented the loyalties of the old officers to the new regime but also strengthened the idea that professional competence, not political initiatives, was the first requirement of the Indian Army’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1964, 7–8). In Pursuit of Lakshmi they returned to this theme and emphasized the importance (similar to others such as Stephen Cohen had done) of this step. They also emphasized the importance, as Samuel Huntington had done, of maintaining the military’s insulation from

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political society through training, physical isolation, a distinctive professional subculture, and the need to limit the number of occasions that the army was called out ‘in aid of the civil power’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 88). The Rudolphs pointed to the many ways in which the Congress had made the army a less desirable field for the ambitious—by reducing the army’s pay and perks, and even position, in the state order of precedence—as well as the ways in which they had downgraded the political clout of the army, for instance by taking the commander-in-chief out of the cabinet and giving the civil servants in the Ministry of Defence more supervisory powers (Rudolph and Rudolph 1964, 9). One important step in 1955 was to reduce the influence of the commander-in-chief by creating three separate service commands, each with their own chief. Nehru admitted in his interview with the Rudolphs that this step ‘certainly was a deliberate decision to reduce the role of the military on the Indian Scene’.5 In his interview, General J.N. Chaudhuri sarcastically emphasized his lack of status in the new post-war regime by telling the Rudolphs that now in the order of precedence ‘he thought in fact he stood next the man in charge of light houses in India’.6 The Rudolphs were surely right that trying to merge the INA and the Indian Army, and making nationalist credentials important to senior promotions, would have created severe and dangerous strains and conflicts within the military. The comparative literature on military transitions from colonialism provides lots of examples of the coups and attempted coups in the 1960s and 1970s (for example, in Nigeria) that resulted when politicians tried to move up members of ‘loyal’ ethnic groups into key military positions, which officers and men from other groups in the army regarded as an imminent threat (see Crocker 1969; Horowitz 1981; Horowitz 1985).7 Closer to home, this strategy worked out very badly in Bangladesh after the 28,000 Bengali military personnel who had been part of the Pakistan Army (almost all of whom were stationed in West Pakistan) were repatriated to Bangladesh in October 1973 and then integrated with the Bangladeshi Army. Discrimination in promotions and postings against former-Pakistan officers (the most senior of whom, Lt. Gen. Khwaja Wasiuddin, was immediately deputed to the foreign ministry over his strong objections) and conflicts over professional expertise versus the political legitimacy of former Mukti Bahini officers led to several coups and counter coups in the late 1970s

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and early 1980s, which ultimately took several decades to work themselves out (Wilkinson 2000, 203–26). The Rudolphs also gave more of a role than many, including the current writer, to a second factor: the professionalism of the military and its British-inherited tradition of non- interference in politics. They argued that ‘under the Raj, Indian officers learned the prudence of having no political views’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1964, 9). This commitment to civilian rule was not unconditional, however, but depended on the government’s competence and effectiveness.8 As pointed out above, however, this legacy factor applied to so many armies—including in coup-prone Pakistan—that it does not do a good job in indicating why India had a distinctive post-Independence trajectory. The third factor the Rudolphs identified was Congress’ skill in avoiding international threats and crises which, by forcing a large military build-up that would necessarily give the military a larger role, had the potential to draw the military into politics. They saw Nehru’s policy of non-alignment as an important way of reducing the threats that would have necessitated a large-scale military build-up or potentially dangerous alliances with foreign states. In India one of the leading justifications of non-alignment has been that it permits India to devote her efforts and resources primarily to economic justice and growth rather than military weapons and personnel. Both Nehru and Menon see the failure of politics in Pakistan as in part a result of the opposite emphasis. Far more resources, prestige and national effort have gone into planned development than the military establishment; both before and after the Chinese invasion, military security has been seen as a function of rapid and effective development. (Rudolph and Rudolph 1964, 10)

The Rudolphs acknowledged that this had the potential to change for the worse in the aftermath of the Indo-Chinese war, with a military build-up, but still felt that due to the overall ‘[s]hort of large-scale and protracted fighting, which at the moment seems unlikely, the scope for men on white horses is limited’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1964, 10). Fourth, they focused on the success of India’s federalism in both helping to manage and defuse political domestic conflicts and also establishing multiple poles of authority and potential resistance in the state, making it practically much harder to launch a coup.

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Defense Minister Chavan, who knows the meaning of state power from his years as Chief Minister of Maharashtra, points out that while control of Karachi could mean control of Pakistan—and even there are problems—Delhi could not easily control unwilling states. Most of the state Chief Ministers are sufficiently self-confident politicians and administrators to take a dim view of military claims that officers govern better. (Rudolph and Rudolph 1964, 10)

The importance of federalism to conflict moderation was a theme to which they frequently returned, for example, in Pursuit of Lakshmi and in a stand-alone article on federalism they wrote in 2010 (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 2010). In that 2010 article they pointed to the long tradition of formal federalism, such as the provincial institutions created in 1861 and the Montague–Chelmsford Reforms of 1919. They also pointed to the long tradition of de facto Indian federalism, dating back to the East India Company, which was the logical consequence of huge distances, poor communication technologies, and the need for local officials to act quickly and in light of local circumstances even if the formal authority to do so was in Calcutta or London. They approvingly cited Thomas Munro’s view that ‘each presidency had “a distinctive approach to problems confronting it.” As a result “competing, independent states in India would produce more efficient and enduring general political order than the total dominance of any single regime, even a British one”’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2010, 560). The Rudolphs’ article was remarkably prescient in many ways. They observed correctly, for instance, well before the Emergency that ‘[i]f military or quasi-military rule is to come to India, it is much more likely to do so under the cover of legality than through a coup d’état’.9 But they could of course not anticipate everything, and their conclusions, as well as being reinforced, have also been supplemented or even challenged in a number of ways.10 My own work, for instance, puts less emphasis on the international security side of the story (probably my mistake) and the professional traditions in the army. Instead, I emphasize a range of other factors including: the coup-proofing that was done from 1947–55, the careful ethnic balancing within the army, the growth of paramilitary forces after 1962 as a direct and indirect ‘hedge’ against the military, the conflict-moderating capacity of a well-institutionalized party, and important decisions made from 1950–53 about the role of caste, language, and religion within the state—decisions that (together

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with the federal institutions) prevented conflicts that might have drawn the army in. I also agree with Horowitz (1985) that in coup-proofing getting the sequence of measures right was absolutely crucial. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh in the 1970s tried to adopt some of the measures that had been effective in controlling any potential threat from the military in India, for example, by creating separate military commands to prevent unified military action and by forming new paramilitary forces loyal to the political leadership (Zulfiqar Bhutto’s 20,000-strong Federal Security Force and Mujibur Rahman’s 20,000-strong Jatiyo Rakhi Bahini). These measures, which might have worked in Pakistan of the 1950s, could not however succeed against the entrenched power of the military in the 1970s, or in Bangladesh, given the extent of the deep military fissures in the force and the society after the brutal 1970–1 war of Independence (Wilkinson 2000).

Is India’s Civil–Military Success Unravelling? The Rudolphs celebrated India’s success in managing civil–military relations and securing democratic stability, but they also warned about several conditions that might undercut this in the future. Would India become so involved in large-scale sustained conflicts abroad or at home that its army might become too big and too powerful, generating officer ‘heroes’ who might want to enter politics? Would the army still be ‘radically enclaved’, and hence insulated, from the broader political conflicts in society? Would politicians, in turn, exercise restraint in their own relations with the army? The Rudolphs warned that ‘[i]f politicians, instead of exercising self-restraint, yield to the temptation to strengthen themselves by developing friends or allies among military men they will inevitably draw the military into politics’. Finally, would India’s political leadership abandon some of its most effective conflictmanagement measures, such as secularism and federalism, drawing the army into politics (Rudolph and Rudolph 1964, 19)? In their 1987 book Pursuit of Lakshmi, they looked back to the personal centralization of power under former prime minister Indira Gandhi, the abuse of central powers vis-à-vis the states, especially the use of president’s rule, and the great strain this had placed on India’s federal fabric (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 97–102). One worry expressed in the contemporary era is that a dominant leader and party may again unbalance India’s federal system.

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Over the past decade these and other worries about civil–military relations have been increasingly voiced by many Indian observers. The Indian Army is increasingly being portrayed, as above criticism, in its forceful actions in putting down insurgencies, especially in Kashmir and the North East. Several of its senior officers, including the former Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General V. K. Singh, have entered politics on a populist agenda and supported Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign. Hundreds of thousands of veterans have also participated in mass political protests, tacitly supported by serving officers, in support of ‘One Rank One Pension’ improvements to military benefits and pensions. Concern has been expressed that politicians themselves seem to be increasingly using military and nationalist symbols, for instance on BJP election posters, and encouraging their use by others, for instance on university campuses, blurring the necessary divide between the army and the civil society (Shukla 2016). There has also been criticism of the current government’s use of the military to perform some obviously civil functions (such as reconstructing a railway bridge) and ordering it to help with the logistics for some events with a pronounced Hindu identity (such as the March 2016 ‘World Culture: Art of Living’ event held to coincide with the Kumbh Mela).11 Lastly, the federal and secular consensus that India has painfully established, and that has led to much greater stability and ability to manage difference and conflict than in Pakistan, also seems to be under increasing threat. There have, it is true, been several signs of trouble. One was the largescale national campaign by representatives of India’s three million veterans, which began under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2008, in favour of ‘One Rank One Pension’ (OROP), the principle that service personnel who retire with the same rank and seniority should receive the same pension. Since service rates of pay have fluctuated significantly over time due to Pay Commission awards, the existing pension system which linked pensions to earned pay meant that officers and men of the same rank and service who retired in different decades might be receiving very different pensions. This movement, which enjoyed widespread support among veterans and serving officers, led to large-scale demonstrations throughout the country, with many politicians offering their support. The BJP promised on the campaign trail to meet these demands but, given the cost, came out with proposals after the election which left many

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veterans dissatisfied. OROP protesters then tried to force the issue by launching protests and hunger strikes at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi in 2015, at which several protesters were roughly handled by the Delhi police, generating public sympathy and a public protest letter from several ex-chiefs. The BJP was anxious to defuse what had become a political hot potato and then largely—though not completely—met the demands early the following year, 2016, despite the large cost.12 Under the UPA II government there was also public disagreement and a legal dispute in 2011–12 between COAS General V. K. Singh and Defence Minister A. K. Anthony over the former’s correct age, and hence correct retirement date. General Singh argued that his age was younger than the age recorded for him by the ministry and he should, therefore, be granted a later retirement date as chief. In the midst of this dispute there were unexplained troop movements—unreported at the time—in the national capital region (NCR) on 16–17 January 2012, the day before Singh’s case was to be heard in the Supreme Court. These army troop movements in violation of the agreed protocols in the NCR, and the government’s and intelligence services’ apparently rapid and panicky response came to light several months later in extensive reporting in The Indian Express (Gupta, Sarin, and Samanta 2012). It seems very unlikely that these movements, even if the reports were accurate, were anything more than Singh trying to flex the army’s muscles in a visible way, but even that was a worrying sign.13

Assessing the Dangers The specific worries about the military becoming more involved in politics, or politicians in the military, are probably overstated. There are good reasons, as I explore below, why political parties and voters do not want large numbers of retired officers in politics, and will not vote for them on the basis of their military ‘expertise’. The dangers of politicians reaching out to the military or publicly identifying themselves with its successes have also been exaggerated. However, in one important area—worries about the stability of India’s federalism, the country’s most important conflict-moderating mechanism—there are some genuine concerns. A large-scale upsurge in communal or regional/state tensions, for example, if the communal violence we have seen since the summer of 2019 were to intensify, would be dangerous

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for civil–military relations in two ways: first, it would expand largescale violent conflicts beyond the 5 per cent of the population where such regional conflicts are currently endemic, potentially drawing the military into more of a policy-making role that it de facto has in parts of Kashmir and the North East; and second, it would create fissures within the army, where much of the recruitment is still into homogenous units on the basis of religion, caste, and language.14

Military ‘Heroes’ in Politics? The phenomenon of military officers trying to enter politics is not new. General Cariappa (who retired as chief in 1953) lobbied President Rajendra Prasad as early as December 1956 to have greater representation of military officers in the Parliament, either through nomination or election, in order to help the government and better ‘represent the service view’ (Choudhary 1992, 246–8). Cariappa, a political reactionary who at various times recommended restricting civil liberties, delaying elections until ‘order’ could be restored, and disbanding political parties, later decided to stand for the Parliament in the 1971 election.15 His campaign then was backed by a cluster of retired officers, including a retired lieutenant general, a rear admiral, four brigadiers, three colonels and lieutenant colonels, and an air marshal (Times of India, 1971, 11). Other less high-profile officers—captains, majors, and colonels—entered the Parliament over subsequent years, often from constituencies with large numbers of veterans in Rajasthan, Punjab, or Himachal. The most prominent of these mid-ranking officers in state politics, Captain Amarinder Singh, is now the chief minister of Punjab, but his position is due more to his status as the ex-Maharaja of Patiala and a leader of the Sikh community as well as leader of the main opposition party to the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in the state, than to his military credentials. At the national level, former finance minister and external affairs minister Jaswant Singh, like several other officers who entered politics, entered the Parliament first through the nomination of his party, the BJP, and only a decade later, in 1990, with its strong backing achieved electoral success to enter the Lok Sabha. Only one former Chief of Army Staff has entered politics and successfully contested an election: General V.K. Singh, who offered his support to Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement after leaving the

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army in 2012. Shortly before the 2014 elections he then joined the BJP. He was given a ticket for the election in the Lok Sabha constituency of Ghaziabad, which has a relatively large number of army veterans and, perhaps more importantly, many members of his own Jat community. He won by a landslide as part of the BJP wave. After the BJP’s election victory, he was then appointed to the BJP government as a Minister of State in External Affairs (independent charge) with responsibility for the North East, purportedly drawing on his military experience in the region. General Singh’s ministerial career should give those worried about Boulangerism—the entry into politics of populist military leaders—some comfort. The BJP gave him a position that was deliberately non-influential, a clear demotion from some of the higher posts with which his name had been linked prior to the election, before his talent for putting his foot in his mouth became widely appreciated. He was then demoted even further in 2015 to a Minister of State (independent charge) in the Statistics and Programme Implementation portfolio of the NDA, which seemed a very odd fit with his military skill set. After the BJP’s 2019 election victory he was appointed to yet another Minister of State position far from his military expertise, as Minister of State for Road Transport and Highways. The fact is that India has strong political parties. The leaders of these parties want the perks of office for themselves and certainly do not want competition from untested former officers, especially those, such as Singh, who are ‘loose cannons’ with a tendency to make comments that are off message. India’s political parties have always been somewhat wary of drawing ex-military leaders into politics. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, Congress governments took great care to send several retiring chiefs out of the country—as High Commissioners to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and on UN positions—in order to prevent them from becoming a problem for domestic politics, as well as reducing their tenures in office to prevent them from getting too comfortable in their leadership positions (Wilkinson 2015, 23). The other reason why military officers are unlikely to succeed in politics in large numbers, as the cases of Cariappa and V.K. Singh show, is that the ‘military vote’ itself is limited outside of a small number of constituencies in major recruiting states such as Rajasthan, Punjab,

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and Himachal. The general public, while viewing the military very favourably—polls have consistently shown it as one of India’s most trusted institutions—has shown it will only vote for retired military officers in large numbers if they have something else going for them, such as community leadership (for example, Amarinder Singh and Sikhs, Rajesh Pilot and Gujars), or the backing of a major party (General V. K. Singh and Col. R.S. Rathore in the 2014–19 BJP government). One measure of the relatively low importance of military candidates for ex-military voters is that none of the MPs elected in 2014 from the ten districts with the highest numbers of army veterans, such as Hoshiarpur (Punjab) and Kangra (HP), were military veterans.16

Is the Military Still ‘Radically Enclaved’? The Rudolphs argued in 1987 that ‘the military, by being radically enclaved, is more insulated from its political environment than the permanent government’, though they followed Stephen Cohen in worrying about the growing number of cases in Punjab, the North East, and in dealing with communal riots in which the army was being called ‘in aid of the civil power’, which risked politicizing the military as well as weakening its effectiveness (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 87–9). Indian governments have, largely successfully, tried to address the latter issue of military over-deployment on counter-insurgency and as an aid to civil power. First, since the 1960s (see Figure 10.1), they have massively increased the number of central paramilitary forces which can be used in place of the military in dealing with many large-scale law-and-order challenges. These forces are now close to 9,00,000 strong, almost as large as the regular army, and under the direction of the Ministry of Home Affairs. The second way in which India has addressed the issue of too much military involvement in counter-insurgency is by raising a new specialized counter-insurgency and peacekeeping force in 1990, the Rashtriya Rifles, to take some of the pressure off the regular armed forces in performing these demanding roles in Jammu and Kashmir and the North East. The force expanded rapidly from its original 15 battalions, as the Kashmir insurgency reached a peak in the 1990s, and stood at 66 battalions in 2010.17

Number of Troops

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1000000

500000

0 1940

1960 Total_Army CRPF

Figure 10.1

1980 Year

2000

2020

Total_Paramilitary_Forces CRPF_BSF_Total

Relative growth of Indian Army and paramilitary forces since Independence

Source: Paramilitary data from the annual reports of the Ministry of Home Affairs Army data from Jane’s Defence; press reports; Indian Defence Plan 1964. Note: Total paramilitary forces include AR, SSB, ITBP, BSF, CRPF, NSG, and CISF. Data interpolated for years where missing.

One thing neither the government nor the army has been able to do, however, is retain the military as an organization and the society apart. This separation was always perhaps an exaggeration in any case, as various mutinies and disciplinary problems over the past century relating to unrest in the home districts of troops makes clear: from widespread unrest in the army over the 1907 Punjab Land Alienation Act, to mutinies and indiscipline among units of almost all north-Indian communities represented in the army during Partition, to several Sikh units’ mutinies in the aftermath of the storming of the Golden Temple complex in 1984.18 The military still recruits very heavily through ethnically homogenous ‘class’ units, and the events of Partition as well as the Sikh movement in the 1980s showed that these units’ reliability cannot always be taken for granted when there is substantial violence taking place in their home areas, or when they are asked to take action against their fellow group members.19 Regardless of how much the separation between the military and the society existed in the past, it is clear that three major developments have sharply reduced that separation in the past few decades. The first is the massive (though of course incomplete) extension of primary

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education in India, which has transformed an army that was substantially illiterate before Independence into one that is literate and much more politically informed today.20 The second main development is what Christophe Jaffrelot (2003) has termed ‘The Silent Revolution’, the political mobilization of backward castes across India and their increase in political power and assertiveness. This has had its effect in several ways on the military. There have been—so far unsuccessful—demands by caste organizations and politicians to create new regiments based on backward-caste identities, for example, the proposed Ahir and Yadava regiments. Disgruntled officers from within the army have also occasionally sought to enlist political allies from outside in order to strengthen their case for promotion, to avoid a court-martial, or for some other benefit, though these cases have been limited and largely unsuccessful.21 The changing caste dynamics have also transformed the willingness of jawans to unquestioningly accept some of the inequalities and injustices of military life (Jaffrelot 2003). In the past decade there have been a growing number of cases where soldiers have roughed up their officers or refused to carry out orders when they have been treated in ways incommensurate with their status or dignity (Hindu, 2012). Third, the physical distance and social isolation of soldiers from the conflicts and tensions of their villages, states, and the wider society has now ended for good with the telecommunications and mobile phone revolution. Soldiers as well as the communities from which they come are in touch through texts, videos, and phone calls and through social media. This is not a significant issue for civil military relations as a whole as long as most major internal conflicts in India are largely confined to the periphery, Jammu and Kashmir, and the North East. But the horrific example of 1947, when many army units from Punjab became unreliable because of communal atrocities in their home provinces, shows the trouble that these now-instantaneous communications could cause if large-scale conflicts were ever again to break out in larger geographical areas of India.22 Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other media can rapidly spread and exaggerate news of violence and conflict, which might pose a real challenge to discipline and cohesion if regional or communal conflicts ever became widespread in the country. At the moment there seems little prospect of such large-scale conflict. But if there were, for example, a renewal of the north–south, Hindi

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versus Dravidian conflicts we saw in the 1950s and 1960s, or the massive centralization of power we saw under Indira Gandhi’s Congress government after 1971, there is a danger that this would cause fissures in the army and real damage to civil–military relations. The army still draws disproportionately in its recruitment from the ‘martial classes’, nonetheless it has become much broader-based in its overall recruitment since Independence with, for example, a larger number of recruits now coming from Uttar Pradesh than from Punjab and Haryana. This means that any broader division within the bulk of the country over some communal or regional dimension would, of necessity, have an impact in the army that has so far been very successful (as has India itself) in unifying its troops around a larger national identity. The example of Pakistan has already shown us that majoritarianism, centralization, and a dominant ideology cannot solve the problems of a diverse society such as India over the long term, and instead tends to generate a massive societal and regional backlash.23 *** This brief chapter cannot do justice to all the complexities of India’s civil–military relations. It has not covered, for instance, the continuing tension between the more muscular foreign policy pursued by the BJP government since 2014, especially towards Pakistan, and the reality—pointed out by numerous parliamentary defence committees and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) audit reports—that India’s conventional weapons systems are woefully out of date and that stocks of ammunition and other supplies are insufficient to handle a major conflict. The bulk of the new money that has gone into defence expenditures under the past few governments has been utilized for manpower costs, especially pensions and salary increases, rather than the capital expenditures that are so badly needed to modernize the Indian Army, Navy, and Air Force. Given India’s role as the regional hegemon, however, these problems are likely manageable. Looking to the future, only a determined effort by a rising China to counteract India by land and sea, or a substantial conflict within India’s federal system, has the potential to lead to a substantial change in the civil–military balance that has served India well since the 1950s.

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Endnotes 1. Interview with General J.N. Chaudhuri, 11 February 1963, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, ‘1962–63 Interviews’. I am grateful to Professors Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph for their generosity in making these notes available to me. 2. In particular, parts of In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (1987), and Rudolph and Rudolph (2010). Their notes from 1962 to 1963 contain a fully worked out plan for a larger book-length project, though never completed, on ‘The Role of the Military Services in Indian Political Life’, much broader than their 1964 article and including comparisons with Indonesia, Burma, and Pakistan. 3. Serving officers were (and are) strictly forbidden from giving interviews on political topics. 4. The interview recordings were then typed out by Susanne’s brother Frank, an undergraduate on leave from Columbia University. Lloyd Rudolph, email to Steven Wilkinson and Gareth Nellis describing Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph’s ‘1962–63 Interviews’, 30 November 2013. 5. Interview with Nehru, 13 February 1963, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, ‘1962–63 Interviews’. 6. Interview with General G.N. Chaudhuri, 11 February 1963, Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, ‘1962–63 Interviews’. 7. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985) and Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives (1981); see also Crocker (1969), where he discusses the mutinies in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda over these issues in 1964. 8. My argument in Army and Nation (2015) is that this professional socialization that Indian and Pakistani officers experienced in the colonial Indian Army was exactly the same, and that this could not help explain the variation in outcomes between the two countries. See also Samuel Finer in Soldier on Horseback (Finer 1962, 20–5), and Aqil Shah in his recent book on the Pakistan military The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (2014, 5–6). 9. Generals and Politics (1964, 13). Though they saw the president as the main actor rather than a prime minister who directed the president, as came to pass in 1975. 10. A sample of some of the major works would include Richard Symonds (1966); A.L. Venkateshwaran (1967); S. S. Khera (1968); Stephen P. Cohen’s landmark book The Indian Army (1971), following an important article he wrote on ‘The Untouchable Soldier: Caste, politics and the Indian Army’ (1969, 453–68); S.L. Menezes (1999); Srinath Raghavan (2009); Philip Oldenburg (2010); Mukherjee (2012); and Maya Tudor (2013).

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11. Major General Satbir Singh (retd) complained about the army’s use in constructing a pontoon bridge for the World Culture Festival, organized by the religious figure and BJP ally Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, that ‘[o]ur soldiers are not meant for such shit. It is a compromise with the dignity of the country’s defence forces. It is a shame that the government is giving undeserved public resources to an individual in return of his political support’. Times of India also quoted Colonel Pushpendra Singh (retd) who said he condemned the action and that the ‘[a]rmy should not be deployed for any such function. It is meant to secure borders’. Available at http://www.firstpost.com/politics/ soldiers-building-bridge-for-art-of-living-festival-shameful-rotten-say- militaryveterans-2664254.html. Last accessed on 27 February 2020. 12. The BJP’s legislation only allows for revision of pensions every five years, pays arrears in several installments, and originally did not grant OROP to those who left the army voluntarily before retirement age. While the ‘voluntary’ provision sounds fair, the fact is that in an organization with as few senior posts as the army, many officers leave the army ‘voluntarily’ when they are not promoted. Protests over the ‘voluntary’ clause led to a reversal of policy, granting full OROP pensions to those who retired before 2014, but not to those who retired in future. 13. The Indian Express story was denied at the time by the government and the Army, but many details were confirmed in a subsequent February 2014 story with retired Lieutenant General A. K. Choudhary, the former director general of military operations (Indian Express, 2014). 14. Roughly two-thirds of infantry and armored battalions are still recruited on the basis of ‘class’ identities. 15. For Cariappa’s political views, see Times of India (1970a, 1970b). 16. The ten districts with the highest numbers of Army ESMs (2008) are Hoshiarpur, Kangra, Gurdaspur, Jhunjhunu, Bhiwani, Jammu, Jhajar, Amritsar, Bhokpur, and Taran Taran. 17. ‘Strength of Rashtriya Rifles’, Answer to Rajya Sabha starred question no. 423, Rajya Sabha Debates, 4 May 1995, 27–34; Rajagopalan (2010). 18. In 1984, several Sikh units mutinied after the army’s attack on militants in the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, an attack that itself took days longer than expected because many Sikh ex-soldiers—including two retired major generals, one of whom was the former CO of the Indian army officer in charge of the attack—were defending the complex. These units included two which were exclusively Sikh—the 18 Sikh and the 9 Sikh—and one that was 75 per cent Sikh—the 14 Punjab. The other unit that mutinied was the 171 Field regiment. See Pritam Bhullar (1987, 11–39) and Khushwant Singh (1991, 340). 19. During Partition, after violence broke out in their home districts, many units had become ‘affected with the communal virus’ by late August 1947,

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according to the army chief, and were unreliable in protecting refugees of the opposite religion, or in their willingness to fire on co-religionists. The Joint Defence Council, therefore, changed the rules for protective forces so that after 1 September 1947 only Muslim soldiers would protect Muslims on their way to Pakistan and only Hindu and Sikh soldiers would protect Hindus and Sikhs on their way to India. ‘Note for the Joint Defence Council by the Supreme Commander [Auchinleck] on the Future of the Punjab Boundary Force (Top Secret)’ Decisions on Military Items of the Partition Council and Proceedings of the Provisional Joint Defence Council and the Joint Defence Council, no. 15, 28 August 1947, Partition Proceedings 1947–1950, vol. 5, NEG 3659, p. 272. 20. Data on the army’s pre-Independence literacy levels (for example, 82 per cent illiterate in the infantry, 68 per cent in the artillery) come from Report of Infantry Committee (1943). 21. General V.K. Singh, for instance was publicly backed by several politicians from his own Rajput caste during his dispute with Defence Minister A.K. Anthony. 22. Punjabi troops became so unreliable in September 1947, due to the disturbed conditions in Punjab, that the government was forced to use Gorkha (5 Gurkha) and southern Indian (4 Madras) troops to quell communal riots in Delhi. ‘150 Dead in New Delhi Communal Outbreak’, Daily Telegraph, (Tuesday) 9 September 1947, 1. Shortly before, in the aftermath of several troubling incidents of partisanship, the Joint Defence Council had passed a regulation that, henceforth, only Muslim troops would protect Muslims en route to Pakistan, and Hindu and Sikh troops will protect Hindus and Sikhs en route to India. ‘Note for the Joint Defence Council by the Supreme Commander [Auchinleck] on the Future of the Punjab Boundary Force (Top Secret)’, Decisions on Military Items of the Partition Council and Proceedings of the Provisional Joint Defence Council and the Joint Defence Council, no. 15, 28 August 1947. Partition Proceedings 1947–50, vol. 5, NEG 3659. 23. Interestingly, the overall level of diversity in India and Pakistan in 1947, judged by conventional fractionalization indices, was in fact very similar. India’s federal policies and the federal nature of Congress in the 1950s worked to lessen those cleavages politically, while Pakistan’s centralizing efforts, while aimed at unifying the population, only worked to accentuate them.

References Bhullar, Pritam. 1987. The Sikh Mutiny. New Delhi: Siddharth Publications. Choudhary, Valmiki, ed. 1992. Dr. Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents, Volume 18: Presidency Period January 1956 to December 1857. Mumbai: Allied Publishers.

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Cohen, Stephen P. 1969. ‘The Untouchable Soldier: Caste, Politics and the Indian Army’. Journal of Asian Studies 28 (3): 453–68. ———. 1971. The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of the Nation. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Crocker, Chester A. 1969. ‘The Military Transfer of Power in Africa: A Comparative Study of Change in the British and French Systems of Order’. Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, USA. Finer, Samuel. 1962. The Man on Horseback: The Role of Military in Politics. London: Pall Mall. Gupta, Shikhar, Ritu Sarin, and Pranab Dhal Samanta. 2012. ‘The Night Raisina Hill Was Spooked’. Indian Express, 4 April. Available at http://m.indianexpress.com/news/the-january-night-raisina-hill-was-spooked-two-key-army -units-moved-towards-delhi-without-notifying-govt/932328. Last accessed on 27 February 2020. Gutteridge, William. 1962. Armed Forces in New States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hindu. 2012. ‘Ladakh Troop Revolt Underlines Army Class Tensions’. 21 June. Available at http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ladakh-troop-revoltunderlines-army-class- tensions/article3412907.ece. Last accessed on 21 November 2013. Horowitz, Donald L. 1981. Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1957. Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of CivilMilitary Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Indian Express. 2014. ‘Top General Speaks: Defense Secretary Summoned Me Late Night, said Highest Seat of Power Was Worried, Troops Must Go Back Quickly’. 21 February. Available at https://indianexpress.com/article/ india/india-others/top-general-speaks-def-secy-summoned-me-late-nightsaid-highest-seat-of-power-was-worried-troops-must-go-back-quickly/. Last accessed on 27 February 2020. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2003. India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan. Khera, S. S. 1968. India’s Defence Problem. New Delhi: Orient Longmans. Menezes, S. L. 1999. Fidelity and Honour: The Indian Army from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mukherjee, Anit. 2012. ‘The Absent Dialogue: Civil-Military Relations and Military Effectiveness in India’. Dissertation, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, USA. Oldenburg, Philip. 2010. India, Pakistan and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths. New York: Routledge.

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Rajagopalan, Rajesh. 2010. ‘Innovations in Counterinsurgency: The Indian Army’s Rashtriya Rifles’. Contemporary South Asia 13 (1): 25–37. Report of Infantry Committee. 1943. Appendix A, ‘Comparison of Educated Personnel in Various Arms of the Service’. IOR L/WS/1/1371. Rudolph, Lloyd, and Susanne H. Rudolph. 1964. ‘Generals and Politics in India’. Pacific Affairs 37 (1): 5–19. ———. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010 ‘Federalism as State Formation in India: A Theory of Shared and Negotiated Sovereignty’. International Political Science Review 31 (5): 553–72. Shah, Aqil. 2014. The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shukla, Ajai. 2016. ‘Army Silent as Soldier, Surgical Strikes Feature in BJP Election Posters’. Business Standard, 8 October. Available at https://www.businessstandard.com/article/current-affairs/army-silent-as-soldier-surgical-strikesfeature-in-bjp-election-posters-116100800315_1.html. Last accessed on 27 February 2020. ———. 2016. ‘Army Mute as BJP Election Posters Feature Solider, Surgical Strikes’. The Wire, 9 October. Available at https://thewire.in/politics/armysilent-surgical-strikes-bjp-election-posters. Last accessed on 27 February 2020. Singh, Khushwant. 1991. A History of the Sikhs, Volume 2: 1839–1988. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Srinath Raghavan. 2009. ‘Civil–Military Relations in India: The China Crisis and After’. Journal of Strategic Studies 32 (1): 149–75. Symonds, Richard. 1966. The British and Their Successor: A Study in the Development of the Government Services in the New States. Evanston, IN: Northwestern University Press. Times of India. 1970a. ‘Nation Needs President’s Rule, Feels Cariappa’. 11 March, p. 13. ———. 1970b. ‘Cariappa’s Plea to Defer General Election’. 17 September, p. 3. ———. 1971. ‘Ex-officers Back General Cariappa’. 21 February, p. 11. Tudor, Maya. 2013. The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Venkateshwaran, A. L. 1967. Defence Organisation in India. New Delhi: Government of India. Wilkinson, Steven I. 2000. ‘Democratic Consolidation and Failure: Lessons from Bangladesh and Pakistan’. Democratization 7 (3): 203–26. ———. 2015. Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Centrism, Political Leadership, and the Future of Indian Politics* john echeverri-gent and kamal sadiq

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he 2019 general election outcome marks an important point in the protracted, nonetheless profound, transformation of Indian politics. At the societal level the transition has been characterized by the political ascendance of the popular classes—in particular, the Other Backward Classes, Dalits, and Adivasis. The party system has been converted from a Congress-centred system to a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-centred one. The Indian state is being transformed from a liberal democracy, where executive power is limited by counterbalancing institutions and where there are special provisions to protect minority rights, to an illiberal majoritarian democracy where power and authority is concentrated in the executive and minority rights are eroded. The scholarship of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph helps to explain this transition and its contingent future trajectory through two seminal insights that are at odds with each other. The first insight is their claim, ‘The most striking feature of Indian politics is its persistent centrism’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1980, 575). This insight is grounded in their observation that India’s decentralized and * The authors would like to thank Rakhahari Chatterjee, Mujibur Rehman, and Milan Vaishnav for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Centrism, Political Leadership, and the Future of Indian Politics. In: Interpreting Politics. Edited by John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/ 9780190125011.003.0011

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pluralistic social structure along with the nature of its political institutions constrained the mainstream of Indian polity to centrist politics. The Rudolphs’ second seminal insight concerns political leadership’s potential for transformative agency. They highlighted ‘the creative possibilities of charismatic leadership’. Drawing on the experience of India’s Independence movement, they remarked, ‘Gandhi evoked in himself and those who “heard” him responses that transcended the routine of ordinary life, producing extraordinary events and effects on character, which, metaphorically, can be described as “magical”’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 213). These insights pose a contradiction. The argument for the fundamentally centrist nature of Indian politics directs our attention to the structural causes of India’s centrism. Like structural arguments whose variables consistently align to overdetermine a particular outcome, it is an explanation of continuity. Observations regarding charismatic political leadership is an argument about change. The Rudolphs suggest that charismatic leaders can inspire their followers to engage in extraordinary acts that lead to profound social and political transformation. In this chapter, we apply these contradictory insights to explain important dynamics in contemporary Indian politics. We begin by elaborating the Rudolphs’ contention about India’s centrist politics, taking care to outline the structural causes that it highlights. Next, we explain the Rudolphs’ analysis of political leadership elaborating its two key features—political theatre and political organization. We then apply the contentions about centrism and political leadership to analyse the transformation of contemporary Indian politics that has occurred with the rise of Narendra Modi. Our analysis leads to two conclusions: (1)  understanding the tensions generated by the contradiction between centrism and the agency of political leadership is key to understanding the trajectory of change currently prevailing in India’s political system; and (2) in addition to his skillful use of political theatre, Narendra Modi has crafted a strategy of multilayered leadership based on synergetic relations between himself, other political leaders, organizations of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and Hindutva militants that enable him to accommodate the forces of centrism even as he leads the forces of Hindutva to radically transform them.

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Centrism and Indian Politics India’s centrism, according to the Rudolphs, is grounded in a pluralist society and federal system that compartmentalizes conflict and compels compromise in the process of aggregating local interests. Robust political institutions and a vibrant civil society check executive overreach. Within this context, prevailing political ideologies are moderate and inclusive rather than exclusive, class-based, or confessional (Rudolph and Rudolph 1980). The Rudolphs’ contention that Indian politics is fundamentally centrist is based on the interaction of three factors: (1) their interpretive approach to politics; (2) the remarkable cultural diversity and social pluralism of India’s social structure; and (3) political institutions that incentivize centrism. In executing their interpretive approach, the Rudolphs privileged subjective interest as the principle motivation for political action. In contrast to Marxist and rational choice modes of analysis which deductively impute interests to actors, the Rudolphs (1987, 248) analysed interests ‘phenomenologically and contingently’. Interests were associated with a broad range of social groupings: those delineated by ‘class, caste, tribe, or status group; religious, linguistic or territorial community’; those determined by profession or occupations; and those structured by property relations. The political salience of particular configurations of interests and political actors ‘are as much a matter of context and choice as objective determination’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987, 248). This interpretative approach to interest representation—influenced to a large degree by the American pluralist approach to interest group politics—constitutes an analytical framework conducive to political centrism, or at least the marginalization of extremist politics, in the context of a society characterized by cultural and social pluralism. The Rudolphs’ extensive study of Indian society led them to conceptualize Indian social structure as including extraordinary cultural diversity and social pluralism. The political salience of diverse status groups such as castes, religious groupings, and regional identities meant that actors marginalized, or at least compartmentalized, class mobilization. In the Rudolphs’ early work, when agrarian mobilization took place, it either occurred through vertical mobilization led by traditional notables, horizontal mobilization through caste associations, or differential mobilization by political parties (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967).

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These forms of mobilization were localized in large measure due to the differentiation of structures across regions. As Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan (Chapter 5 of this volume) and Agarwala and Herring (Chapter 6 of this volume) show, the Rudolphs later recognized a more extensive agrarian mobilization led by middle peasants or ‘bullock capitalists’ developed in the 1970s. The call of ‘new agrarianism’ for a more favourable treatment to the agricultural sector transcended class, caste, and religious divisions within the sector. The position of bullock capitalists as simultaneous owners of capital and providers of labour along with their effort to appeal to a diverse constituency motivated these middle peasants to limit their demands to relatively moderate measures such as price supports and more rural investment that redressed the perceived urban bias of India’s economic development policy (Rudolph and Rudolph 1980, 1987). Social diversity also impeded the success of religious parties. India’s ‘Hindu majority’, according to the Rudolphs, was ‘an artifact of categorization’ that obscured but did not dismantle ‘the diversity of gods, texts and social practice and a variety of ontologies and epistemologies’ that rendered the ‘Hindu majority … an illusory support base for a national confessional party’ (Rudolphs 1987, 37). In addition, the electoral strength of disadvantaged groups within Hinduism and religious and social minorities outside of it curtailed the possibilities for successful electoral mobilization along majoritarian religious lines. Even after the BJP formed the central government, the Rudolphs (2002) failed to see how the forces of Hindutva would secure growing support from backward castes, Dalits, and Adivasis that would help undermine centrism. Sectoral divides also curtailed the prospects for wide-ranging radicalism, as seen in the prominence that the Rudolphs gave to ‘demand groups’. Proponents of the ‘new agrarianism’ were not likely to align with urban groups who benefitted from the ‘urban bias’ that they were attempting to curtail. Within industry, the divide between the organized and the informal sector limited the development of the working class, while within agriculture, the political salience of status groups such as castes and religious groupings marginalized agrarian class mobilization. Instead of class mobilization, the Rudolphs observed that mobilization occurred along sectoral lines. Bullock capitalists, as producers who owned capital but also worked as labourers, rallied members of the agrarian sector as a ‘demand group’ that transcended

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class divides. Students comprised another prominent demand group which often mobilized and at times—such as the movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1974–5—challenged centrist regimes, but due to their ethnic and regional fragmentation, easy access to careers in political parties, and cultural construction as wards rather than citizens, they focused on local educational issues and never threatened the centrist consensus. Industrial labourers came closest to class mobilization, but fragmented labour unions and the divides between organized and unorganized sectors as well as within the organized sector between private and public sector workers greatly limited their advocacy of class interests. The interaction of India’s social and cultural pluralism with its political institutions was an additional cause of Indian centrism. The Rudolphs thought that India’s single-member, first-past-thepost electoral constituencies favour centrist as opposed to extremist candidates. India’s federal system encouraged diversification of politics across localities and representation of diverse interests at the national level. Political parties must either fashion programmes that appeal to a diverse range of interests if they were to win a parliamentary majority or join coalitions with other parties who are all obliged to make centrist compromises in order to remain in power. The Rudolphs observed that the dominance of the Congress Party during the initial decades of the post-colonial era simultaneously reflected the incentives for centrism created by other political institutions and, through incorporation of a wide spectrum of interests, served as an arena for pluralist bargaining that produced centrist leadership, policies, and ideology. Finally, the Rudolphs contended that the preponderant power of India’s postcolonial state played an important role in promoting centrism. As a ‘third actor’, the Indian state pre-empted class-based politics by increasing the ‘organizational involution’ or fragmentation of labour organizations and the dependence of Indian business. The state’s labour regime divided the relatively privileged workers in the organized sector from those in the informal sector, while its ‘license permit raj’ motivated firms to pursue their interests through individualistic rent-seeking rather than broad-based class action. The Rudolphs concluded that India’s social and cultural diversity is configured with its political institutions to create a system of ‘state-dominated pluralism’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987) that promoted federalism while marginalizing radicalism.

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The Rudolphs’ Perspective on Political Leadership As noted in Chapter 2, the Rudolphs’ study of political leadership is deeply grounded in their interpretive approach to political analysis with its focus on how individual actors translate their circumstances into meaning, motivation, and ultimately action. For the most part, the Rudolphs’ analysis is focused on the ways that political leaders shaped this interpretive process. It highlighted the political psychology dimensions of political leadership. For instance, they pointed out that the key to Gandhi’s success as a political leader was his understanding of the psyche of the Indian public and his incisive use of existing cultural scripts, values, and social relationships to craft narratives that resonated with its wounds and desires. The Rudolphs never elaborated a systematic theory of political leadership, but they offered many insightful observations, especially in their essays on Gandhi—a leader they studied at great length. We draw from these observations to discern the qualities of successful political leadership. The Rudolphs asserted (2006, 143) that in Gandhi’s view, power was ‘based on willing cooperation’. Political leaders, such as Gandhi, secure cooperation and power through the use of ‘political theatre’ in order to create moving human connections with both supporters and adversaries. The Rudolphs employ the concept of political theatre to suggest that a crucial function of leadership is to strategically orchestrate performances that are staged to shape the understanding and motivations of supporters and adversaries. The scripts for Gandhi’s political theatre were often inspired by traditional values and customs, but they simultaneously strove to undermine values and customs—for example, untouchability, disdain for physical labour, et cetera—that Gandhi deemed as iniquitous. In the Rudolphs’ analysis, the importance of political theatre extends beyond Gandhi and conventional politics into the far reaches of contemporary political economy. The Rudolphs (2001, 1541) observed that ‘[e]conomies can be understood as constructions, products of symbols and rhetoric as well as of theorists and practitioners’ concepts and categories’. They served as sites for symbolic dramas in which actors ‘speak scripts that go beyond the positivist world of the professional economist, beyond the interests and preferences of capital and labor, consumers and producers, buyers and sellers’. The

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setting of the ‘political economy theatre’ is provided by institutions and policies that place some actors centre stage and sideline others. In this way, economic liberalization created a ‘federal market economy’ that made chief ministers important protagonists. Those who succeeded in presenting themselves as policy entrepreneurs became heroes along with successful entrepreneurs from the private sector. Amrita Basu’s (Chapter 8 of this volume) insightful analysis of the sources of Gandhi’s charisma helps us to understand where leaders get the important components of the scripts that guide their performative communication in political theatre. We can understand scripts of political theatre as dramatic plots structuring communicative performance. One source of the scripts, as Basu points out, was Gandhi’s unusually incisive insights about his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities. His honest descriptions of his limitations and his struggles to surmount them contributed to dramatic narratives that connected Gandhi’s humanity with that of his audience. The second source of scripts for Gandhi’s political theater was his perceptive political psychology. Susanne Rudolph (1963, 99) observed, ‘Gandhi had a unique sensibility both for the nightmare terrors of the Indian psyche and its commonplace daytime self-doubts.’ During their colonial rule, the British had constructed an image of Indians as being untrustworthy, racially inferior, and cowardly. Apprehensive that there might be some truth in the British portrayal, Indians had to overcome their self-doubts. Gandhi’s strategy of civil disobedience through satyagraha created a pageant that demonstrated Indians’ moral value both to themselves and to the British. Nehru, as quoted by the Rudolphs, best described Gandhi’s impact thus: The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth and action allied to these. … So, suddenly as it were, that black pall of fear was lifted from the people’s shoulders, not wholly of course, but to an amazing degree. … It was a psychological change, almost as if an expert in psychoanalytical method had probed deep into the patient’s past found out the origins of his complexes, exposed them to his view, and thus rid him of that burden. (Nehru 1946, 361–2; cited in Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 177)

Gandhi’s creative appropriation of Indian culture was another source of the dramatic plots and vocabulary of his scripts. This was essential

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to the success of Gandhi’s leadership not only so that his drama could resonate with the Indian public but also as proof of his authenticity to British colonial rulers who criticized leaders of the nationalist movement as being rootless elites cut off from the concerns of common Indians. Gandhi’s self-presentation drew upon the Indian tradition of sanyasis and their asceticism and search for the truth. Gandhi’s strategy of satyagraha was effective in part because it ‘expressed deeply embedded cultural values in an understandable and dramatical form’, such as ahimsa or non-violence, but also because Gandhi connected it to urgent issues of the day such as rural tax relief, urban labour grievances, and untouchability (Rudolph and Rudolph, 2006). Gandhi drew on Indian traditions to redefine courage away from a Western approach that stressed aggressiveness, assertive self-confidence, and military traditions. Instead, Gandhi appropriated from religious traditions on the subcontinent to define courage as being grounded in self-discipline, suffering, and controlling the impulses to retaliate (199–200). Drawing from his understanding of village panchayats Gandhi redefined the norms for conflict resolution from confrontation between clearly articulated alternatives, as is the case for Western adversarial legal traditions, to a consensual process that suppresses overt clashes and decisive victories in favour of arbitration and compromise (201–3). According to the Rudolphs, political theatre has both private and public audiences. As the protagonist of the political drama, the leader’s private morality has public consequences. Swaraj, or self-rule, not only applies to the nation but also to achieving individual self-rule, which enhances the prospects for national self-rule. As a leader achieves selfcontrol over her body, she exerts self-control over her environment. Performances demonstrating a leader’s control over self and circumstance enhance the leader’s self-confidence as well as the confidence of her supporters. They often evoke surprising strengths and virtues that transcend quotidian routine and ultimately produce extraordinary events. As such, they are a source of charismatic appeal (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 212–13). At the same time that political theatre enhances the persuasiveness and charisma of political leaders, it is also designed to provoke deliberation among supporters and adversaries. The Rudolphs were critical of Habermas’ approach to deliberation (Habermas 1984; see also Calhoun 1996 and Pantham 1987), pointing out that in cases

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where adversaries had settled convictions, appeal to reason was insufficient. Quoting Gandhi, they observed that leaders needed to resort to performances in the political theatre to ‘reach the reason through the heart’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 158). Success can be achieved only ‘after carefully researching the circumstances and facts, listening to the adversary and “putting yourself in his shoes”’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2006, 159). These acts not only better inform a leader’s strategy, they are themselves part of the performance that begins to persuade the adversary, as well as the broader audience, of the leader’s correctness. Performances such as satyagraha create social relationships and initiate conversations. They inspire adversaries to imagine themselves in each other’s shoes. This empathy changes hearts and minds and enhances the prospects for consensual agreement. Reaching reason through the heart is likely to minimize superficial formal change and produce more profound transformation, as institutional reforms are reinforced by personal convictions. It is at the very heart of the concept of ‘moral authority’ elaborated by Kristen Monroe in Chapter 4 of this volume. The diversity of the constituents included in the anti-colonial coalition is a great tribute to Gandhi’s political leadership. It was accomplished in large measure due to what Suhas Palshikar (2015b) has described with regards to Narendra Modi as ‘multilayered’ political leadership, meaning that Modi presents different scripts to different audiences in order to maximize his political advantage. We extend Palshikar’s idea by adding two additional dimensions to the concept. For our analysis, not only does multilayered leadership refer to performing different scripts for different audiences but also to the presentation of ambiguous or multivalent messages that can be interpreted by different members of an audience in different ways, reflecting their interests and backgrounds, and to the strategic use of relationships with other political actors to send controversial messages while minimizing public accountability. Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma (2018, 133–40) make a distinction between transactional and transformational leaders. The former are problem solvers, brokers, and providers of patronage, while the latter ‘inspires people with a vision’. The Rudolphs’ view of political leaders is similar to Chhibber and Verma’s transformational leader, someone who imparts a mobilizing vision to voters

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and party members. Chhibber and Verma note that transformational leaders are not confined to political parties but can also include nonpartisan actors such as religious leaders. These points are consistent with the Rudolphs’ analysis. There is no disputing that Gandhi, the leader whose experience provided the basis for many of the Rudolphs insights, was indeed transformational. Nonetheless, situating the Rudolphs’ study of leadership in the context of their interpretive approach to politics suggests a conception of political leadership that transcends Chhibber and Verma’s conceptualization. In the Rudolph’s view, political leaders play an interpretive role in political discourse even when it does not lead to transformational change. Political leaders may use discourse to maintain the status quo as well as bring about change. In fact, the interpretive role of political leaders is as important for maintaining the status quo as it is for bringing about dramatic transformation. The Rudolphs also point out that political leadership has an important role to play in organizing parties and other forms of political support. At the same time that Gandhi made an appeal to hearts and minds, he transformed the Indian National Congress (INC) from an exclusive club of elitist political amateurs to an organization with dedicated supporters throughout the country (Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). Gandhi, through his own example, introduced an industrious political work ethic. He rationalized the INC’s political organization, imbuing it with a concern for economizing time and resources. Gandhi transformed the INC into a mass political organization, manned by fulltime political workers, capable of mobilizing public opinion in order to pressure the government. In sum, the Rudolphs appreciated the complexity of the elements of effective political leadership. First and foremost, good leadership requires mastering and deploying political theatre in ways that touches the hearts and minds of supporters and adversaries, and in so doing, shapes their process of political interpretation. Strategic use of political theatre conveys messages that are authentic but tactical. Gandhi’s political genius was in part an amalgamation of moral authority, strategic planning, and a situated understanding of peoples’ desires. There is also an organizational dimension to leadership. Political leaders need effective organization to inform them about the hearts and minds of their supporters and adversaries, to help broadcast their

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message as well as to provide feedback on the impact of their dramatic performances. The interpretative and organizational roles of political leaders are complementary as the concept of multilayered leadership suggests. Multilayered leadership has been especially effective in enabling Narendra Modi to transform India’s centrism.

The Construction of a Political Leader: From ‘Vikas Purush’ (Development Man) to ‘Chowkidar’ The Rudolphs elaborated their thesis about India’s centrism at a time when the Congress dominated India’s party system (1947–89). True, the Congress had been ousted from power by the Janata Party in 1977, but the transition to the Janata Party—and then back to the Congress in 1980—only bolstered the evidence in favour of the centrism thesis. The Janata Party—though representing a shift from the catch-all Congress Party to a more middle caste, agrarian power base—was in essence a coalition of diverse parties that hammered out a centrist ‘new agrarian’ policy agenda (Ruparelia 2015). The centrist thesis received further support during the era of coalition politics (1989–2014) that followed as governance occurred through often unwieldy alignments of diverse parties that remained in India’s centrist mainstream even as they gradually liberalized its economic policies. The period of coalitional politics strengthens the centrist contention because it reflects ‘convergence without hegemony’ (Palshikar 2015). With its decisive victories in the general elections of 2014 and 2019, the BJP offers a new challenge to the centrist thesis. Not only has the BJP reinterpreted the earlier mainstream consensus on secularism but, under the dynamic populism of Narendra Modi, some have also suggested that it threatens the institutions and norms of liberal democracy by stoking Hindu majoritarianism and destabilizing institutional authority. The BJP’s announcement on 14 September 2013 that it would make Narendra Modi its prime ministerial candidate had two enduring consequences. Control over the party’s electoral campaign was placed in the hands of Modi and his supporters and the BJP’s campaign became ‘presidential’, placing Modi centre-stage in the BJP’s political theatre. Modi quickly used his authority to empower his long-standing consigliere Amit Shah to take charge of his campaign in the strategic state of Uttar Pradesh and then to serve as BJP president. With his supporters,

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Modi fashioned a script that appeared to conform to the centrist thesis. Ever since Modi began strategizing his rise to the national stage, he began to emphasize his role as the architect of Gujarat’s rapid growth. He first tried out this role on the national stage during his speech in February 2013 at the Shri Ram College of Commerce where he declared, ‘This nation is being ruined by vote bank politics. This nation requires development politics’ (Economic Times, 2013).1 Modi’s 2014 campaign hid conventional Hindutva or Hindu nationalist issues such as the Ram Mandir, the Uniform Civil Code, and Article 370 behind the curtains. In their place, it promoted the centrist issues of economic development, good governance, personal narrative, and a form of religiosity that was designed to extend the BJP’s appeal beyond Hindu nationalists to Hindu traditionalists (Graham 1990). ‘Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas’ (collective efforts, inclusive growth) was the BJP’s call for development and one of the titles of its 2014 election manifesto. An earlier draft—written under the chairmanship of Murli Manohar Joshi, a member of the BJP’s old guard leadership—was shelved during the campaign, and the final manifesto, having been revised to better reflect Modi’s priorities, was published only on 7 April 2014 after the campaigning had ended (Mitra and Schottli 2018, 617). Modi’s call for development emphasized inclusiveness and individual empowerment. More than the extension of welfare programmes, the ‘Vikas Purush’ or ‘Development Man’, as Modi called himself, emphasized employment generation. He pledged to create a National Skill Development Mission to give Indian workers the skills that they needed for good jobs in a modern economy. Having criticized the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) for ‘ten years of jobless growth’ (Bharatiya Janata Party 2014, 4), Modi and his supporters referred to Gujarat, the state where Modi oversaw a decade of rapid growth at more than 10 per cent annually. Shortly after his election, Modi began his ‘Make In India’ programme on 25 September 2014 to generate jobs by increasing exports. He pledged to create 100 million jobs by 2022. Noting that India’s urban population will soon grow from one-third to one-half of the total population, Modi promised to convert cities into high-growth areas and build 100 smart cities with the latest technology and infrastructure. The emphasis on growth, jobs, and skills was well-tailored to the aspirations for economic development and comfortable livelihoods of India’s

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remarkably young electorate (Gupta and Panagariya 2014; Vaishnav and Swanson 2015). Modi’s ‘Vikas Purush’ was honest, humble, and hardworking. The United Progressive Alliance had suffered a series of scandals during its decade in office prior to 2014. Modi and the BJP campaigned against corruption promising ‘minimum government, maximum governance’. Modi crafted a narrative according to which he was an ascetic bachelor, with no family to exploit his political prominence. He was dedicated to fighting the ‘corrupt Gandhi dynasty’ which had monopolized power to control access to illicit funds and black money (Jaffrelot 2015, 58–9). Crusades against corruption have been a staple of opposition campaigns in India at least since the Navnirman (reconstruction) Movement in 1973. Modi’s pledge to end corruption contributed to the broader populist narrative that he was a political outsider who will put ‘India first’ and end the reign of the corrupt establishment. The BJP’s election campaign hired international marketing companies such as Madison World, Ogilvy and Mather, and Soho Square to meticulously present Modi’s image and personality in ways that cultivated widespread appeal (Venugopal 2018). The campaign elaborated a narrative about Modi’s personal background, stressing his humble beginnings and implying that his remarkable rise from the OBC Ghanchi caste in the small Gujarati town of Vadnagar to his position as Gujarat’s chief minister and national leader of the BJP was based on his exceptional merit. Implying that he had an extraordinary physique, Modi declared that ‘[i]t takes a 56-inch chest to achieve what he accomplished in Gujarat’ (Srivastava and Bano 2013). When Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar derisively referred to his childhood employment at a tea stall in a railway station (Bhatnagar and Ramachandran 2014), Modi transformed the slight into a political asset by describing himself as an ‘aam admi’ or common man who could relate to the trials and tribulations of the public. Modi frequently referred to his humble caste background, especially when he was in regions—such as Bihar—with a high share of the electorate from the lower castes (Jaffrelot 2015, 159). He contrasted his modest beginnings with the privileged position of the Gandhi family, referring to Rahul as shahzada (a Muslim princeling) (Press Trust of India 2013) and ‘Mr. Golden Spoon’. Soon ‘#MrGoldenSpoonMovies’ started trending on Twitter (FirstPost, 2 May 2013). Modi began connecting with voters by using

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his modest beginnings to stage ‘chai pe charcha’ (talk over a cup of tea) video broadcasts at 1,000 tea stalls across the country (Sruthijith 2014). Having insisted that the BJP was no longer an upper caste party, he proclaimed, ‘The coming decade will be the decade of the marginalized sections of society’ (Suri and Verma 2017). Modi’s most serious political liability was the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom that killed more than 1,000 people in Gujarat while he served as chief minister, the chief executive of the state. Modi’s efforts to distance himself from the atrocity posed the challenge of doing so without sacrificing the religious appeal associated with the BJP. Modi contrived an ingenuous script to do so. At the same time that he downplayed the most controversial demands associated with Hindu nationalism, he associated himself with the most powerful symbols of Hinduism, making pilgrimages to sacred Hindu sites and deciding to run from the holy Hindu city of Varanasi in addition to his usual constituency in Gujarat.2 Contesting from Varanasi enabled Modi to displace Murli Manohar Joshi, even though Joshi had already begun to distribute his campaign literature in the constituency (Mitra and Schottli 2018, 620). It also enabled Modi to cultivate an image that appealed to Hindu traditionalists (Graham 1990). Modi used campaign events in Varanasi to associate himself with shrines and values that were central to Hindu beliefs while connecting them to widely shared symbols of nationalism. When Modi filed his nomination papers in Varanasi on 24 April 2014, he staged a pageant beginning at Banaras Hindu University—the university established by Madan Mohan Malviya, an early figure in the nationalist movement who was a leader of the conservative Hindu current. As keen observer Shiv Viswanathan remarked, ‘In garlanding Malaviya, Mr. Modi was garlanding a Hindu vision of modernity, often ignored in a search for abstract secularism’ (Viswanathan 2014). After Malviya, Modi visited the statues of Swami Vivekananda, who famously presented Hinduism to the modern world at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Sardar Vallabhai Patel, a rival of Nehru who represented the conservative Hindu current within the Indian National Congress. Modi then paid homage to a statue of B. R. Ambedkar, revered leader of the Dalits, in a gesture that was intended to suggest that Modi and the BJP represented an inclusive coalition that transcended upper-caste privilege. Finally, Modi arranged to have his nomination papers filed by a boatman, a weaver, a singer, and a judge,

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the grandson of Malviya. Viswanathan (2014) observes, ‘It was a perfect quartet of nominees, combining the city and uniting it to the history of the nation. Benaras as a microcosm and India as a macrocosm. … Development and diversity had found a new axis in Mr. Modi.’ Modi’s brilliant dramaturgy was implemented by the most effective electoral organization and social media campaign that India had ever seen. The energetic campaigner spoke at 437 public rallies in the eight months prior to the 2014 elections, donning local headgear as he moved from one region to another (Jaffrelot 2015, 154–5). Modi’s campaign used technology to multiply the impact of his speeches. In some instances, voters saw Modi give speeches simultaneously in as many as 100 villages via his holographic image broadcast by his campaign. In the ‘dark zone’ of Uttar Pradesh, where electronic media was not accessible, 400 video vans showed Modi’s speeches in thousands of villages (Sruthijith 2014). Modi led the parliamentary campaign at the helm of the BJP, which claims to be the world’s largest party with a membership of more than 100 million (Bharatiya Janata Party 2015). It is not only the best organized political party in India but is also the best funded, and its edge in funding has increased further in recent years. In 2017, the party pushed through changes in the campaign finance law that removed limits on contributions and enabled individuals and corporations, including those that are partially foreign-owned, to anonymously finance parties through electoral bonds and shell companies. The spending for the 2019 campaign was scheduled to grow by 40 per cent to an estimated USD 7 billion (Rodrigues et al. 2019). During the two years up to April 2018, the BJP received 94 per cent of all corporate donations. Overall, corporate donations comprised 93 per cent of all contributions greater than the Rs 20,000 threshold for the requirement to report voluntary contributions (Association for Democratic Reforms 2019, 2, 8). The strength of Modi’s campaign organization was greatly increased by the support of organizations officially outside but closely associated with the BJP. The RSS mobilized support for Modi more enthusiastically than it had for most previous BJP leaders. The RSS is a social organization that seeks to spread militant Hindu nationalism into the mainstream of Indian politics and culture. It has created a broad range of cultural, social, and paramilitary organizational affiliates known as its parivar, or family, to promote a Hindu nationalist social order. Modi

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began his association with the RSS as a youth (Marino 2014). After he worked his way up the RSS hierarchy, Modi was deputed to the BJP where he became the organizing secretary for the party’s Gujarat unit in 1987, general secretary of the BJP in 1998, and chief minister of Gujarat in 2001. Modi limited RSS activities while serving as chief minister in Gujarat (Palshikar 2015b, 721) and became an object of resentment for many RSS workers even as he maintained strong ties with RSS’s top leadership and its grassroots cadre (Jaffrelot 2015, 161–2). Strong support from the RSS meant access to the estimated 5-million-strong network of highly disciplined acolytes (Rodenbeck 2018) spread across a range of organizations in the RSS parivar, whose objectives ranged from promoting militant Hindu pride to improving the social welfare of Dalits and Adivasis (Thachil 2014). During the 2014 election, RSS workers volunteered as campaigners, solicited feedback after important campaign speeches, and conducted ‘booth management’ on voting days (Narayan 2014). RSS workers are often noted for their determination and persistence in door-to-door campaigning (Economic Times, 2019). At the executive level, more so than any other BJP leader, Modi’s personal relationship with the RSS and his strong reliance on the RSS network has created a revolving door between high ranking BJP officials and ranking leadership within the RSS. Perhaps the BJP’s most novel organizational innovation was its association with the Citizens for Accountable Government, a nongovernmental organization. Founded by Prashant Kishor, former head of social planning and policy at UNICEF in Chad, the CAG was independently financed by corporate donations but worked closely with the BJP on Modi’s campaign. During the year prior to the election, the CAG employed anywhere from 200 to 400 full-time paid workers, approximately 800 paid interns, and more than 1,00,000 volunteers. Many of the workers had degrees from top universities in India and around the world (Sruthijith 2014). By the time the campaign was underway, the CAG had scrutinized election data to produce a 200-page report on each of the 450 constituencies where the BJP was fielding a candidate. It conceptualized and helped implement Modi’s ‘chai pe charcha’ and was responsible for projecting Modi’s holograms. Pradeep Chhibber and Susan Osterman suggest that those working for the CAG are only a small subset of activists they call ‘vote mobilizers’ or individuals who ‘participated in door-to-door canvassing, donated money or put up

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leaflets/posters etc. for the party’ (2014, 141). They find that an important contributing factor to Modi’s 2014 victory is that he was able to attract a substantially greater share of vote mobilizers than his rivals. These mobilizers were an important factor contributing to the popular support for Modi and the BJP. Together, the BJP, the RSS with its family of organizations, the CAG, and the vote mobilizers presented an unprecedentedly innovative and powerful campaign force that, along with Modi’s tireless work and clever campaign rhetoric, created compelling political theatre and established Modi as a charismatic political leader. Modi and his dramaturgists drafted a different script to maximize his appeal for the 2019 general elections. The script’s hero was transformed from ‘Vikas Purush’ to ‘Chowkidar’, or watchman. An important reason for the shift was the serious shortcomings of his government’s efforts to achieve many of its development objectives. Despite its best efforts to suppress official employment data, figures were leaked indicating that in 2017 India’s unemployment climbed to a 45 year high of 6.1 per cent, compared to 2.2 per cent in 2011 (Jha 2019). The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) found that India lost 11 million jobs in 2018 (Vyas 2019). Modi’s 2019 chowkidar avatar ingeniously underscored security issues while identifying himself with a responsible everyman figure that cut across caste lines. The shift in campaign priorities was dramatized by the fact that in the 2019 manifesto, security issues moved to a section entitled ‘Nation First’, which immediately followed the introduction rather than being buried at the back of the manifesto as in the 2014 version. A terrorist attack on 14 February 2019 in Pulwama, Kashmir, that killed 40 paramilitary troops, heightened the urgency of security issues, as did the Indian response of sending jets to bomb undisputed Pakistani territory. The Modi government had used a ‘surgical’ air strike against Pakistan once before in 2016, after which a popular Hindi film Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) was made to recount the bravery of the troops and the support of the prime minister. Within days after the 2019 Indian retaliation, BJP election posters included motifs of the Pulwama attack and the strikes by the Indian Air Force. On 27 March 2019, Modi again identified himself as a master of security issues by appearing on national television to announce the successful test of an Indian anti-satellite weapon. He criticized the previous government by

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declaring, ‘To make the India of the 21st century strong and for its security, this decision should have been taken long ago. But it kept getting delayed. … It was this chowkidar’s government that had the courage to conduct surgical strikes on land, sky and space. India should develop, India should be secure from enemies’ (Varadarajan 2019). As early as the fall of 2018, Rahul Gandhi attempted to undercut Modi’s chowkidar slogan by using the retort ‘chowkidar chor hai’ (the watchman is a thief) to associate Modi with the controversial Rafale scam. Just as Modi had turned to his advantage the Congress’s 2014 charge that he was ill-suited to be prime minister because of his modest family background, the BJP leader again exploited Gandhi’s retort. Polls showed that Modi retained his public image of honesty and there was considerable sympathy for the view that Modi was being victimized by personal attacks. In addition, Modi was eager to keep the media focus on his rivalry with Rahul Gandhi who had a much lower standing among the public. On 16 March 2019, Modi launched a social media campaign called ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’ (I too am a chowkidar) by adding ‘chowkidar’ to his twitter handle as a prefix. Soon, virtually all the BJP leaders and thousands of BJP supporters followed him, underscoring their solidarity with the prime minister (Chaturvedi and Anshuman 2019). As in 2014, Modi and the BJP again extended an appeal to Hindu traditionalists. The most obvious example of this was the stand that Modi and the BJP took on the Sabarimala temple issue in the state of Kerala, where the BJP historically had virtually no political presence. Traditionally, women of menstruating age were barred from entering the Sabarimala temple because they were considered unclean. In September 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the ban violated women’s constitutional rights. Aligning with the traditionalists, the BJP took up the issue as its activists joined to forcibly prevent menstruationaged women from entering the temple. They engaged in huge clashes with supporters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)–led state government which was intent on implementing the Supreme Court’s order. Modi himself weighed in on the issue, declaring, ‘Some people were, in the name of implementing the Supreme Court order, trying to harm the faith of the land’ (Basheer 2019). Modi alleged that the Congress, communists, and the Muslim League were ‘playing a dangerous game regarding Sabarimala temple. … They are using brute

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force to strike at the roots of our faith and expression. Sadly for them, as long as BJP is there, nobody will be able to destroy our faith and culture’ (Anilkumar 2019). There were other invocations of traditional religious symbolism including the video Modi released on 21 May 2019, showing him serenely meditating in a Himalayan cave near the holy Hindu pilgrimage shrine at Kedarnath (Republic World, 2019). By 2019, more than 500 million Indians had access to social media. Facebook had 300 million users in India. 250 million Indians used YouTube, and 200 million were on WhatsApp. Modi and the BJP invested considerable resources to create a vast internet ecosystem to amplify his messages, especially among India’s youth. The head of the BJP social media campaign, Amit Malviya, claimed to have a network of 1.2 million volunteers ready to spread the BJP campaign message (Indian Express, 2019a). In February 2019, before the electoral campaign was formally inaugurated, the BJP reportedly spent over USD 340,000 on its social media campaign. This was more than 20 times the spending of the largest opposition party. The internet ecosystem created by Modi’s supporters included a broad range of platforms and apps that carefully constructed his image as well as the images of his opponents. Modi’s Twitter account is reported to have more than 50 million followers. Modi had a YouTube channel with more than 120 playlists, a web archive of his events and speeches, as well as a Pinterest board. His NaMo app had been downloaded more than 5 million times from the Google Playstore, and one of India’s major mobile phone manufacturers, Reliance JioPhone, provides it preinstalled on some phone models. During the election campaign Modi was able to create Namo TV, his own television channel, which was quickly carried by all of India’s satellite television platforms (Pal 2019). A Bollywood feature film PM Narendra Modi (2019) was produced just in time for the election campaign. Although the Election Commission prohibited its release until after the elections, trailers for the film were downloaded more than 36 million times from YouTube before the end of the election campaign. Narendra Modi’s remarkable success has been greatly facilitated by his multilayered leadership. Modi’s forces of Hindutva strategically performed different scripts for different audiences—the first component of multilayered leadership. We can see this in two starkly different ways. BJP members and/or members of the RSS family or other sympathizers

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exploited events to promote tensions between Hindus and the minorities in constituencies where attempts to unify Hindus behind the party of Hindutva were most likely to contribute to electoral success. This was apparent, for instance, in 2014 in western Uttar Pradesh and in 2019 in West Bengal and Assam. Rigorous statistical analysis shows that supporters of the BJP systematically incite violence in constituencies where it is politically advantageous to the BJP but refrain from promoting violence in areas where it would not create advantages (Wilkinson 2004; Dhattiwala and Michael Biggs 2012). In an utterly different manner, the multilayered leadership under Modi enabled the BJP to garner support beyond its historical base among the upper castes and urban merchants. Tariq Thachil (2014) shows how the BJP was able to extend its support among Adivasis, historically hostile to the Hindutva ideology, through the provision of social services by ‘apolitical’ social service workers deployed by RSS affiliated organizations such as the Vanwasi Kalyan Ashram and Sewa Bharati. In backward areas, with poor social services and little previous politicization, members of these organizations were able to build credibility among Adivasi communities by presenting themselves as ‘apolitical’ social workers dedicated to uplifting the plight of Adivasis by providing much needed basic health and educational services. These non-electoral activists brought considerable electoral advantages to the BJP. Having embedded themselves in the Adivasi communities, they used their familiarity and understanding to help the BJP formulate electoral strategies and recruit candidates and party workers. They influenced Adivasi opinion by subtly highlighting the virtues of BJP candidates and spreading unflattering rumors about the opposition. Across a controlled study of selected districts in Chhattisgarh, Thachil shows that support for the BJP increased most in those districts where the presence of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and Sewa Bharati was greatest. The BJP’s success in 2014 and 2019 was also facilitated by the second element of its multilayered leadership: its presentation of multivalent messages. The best example of this is Modi himself. Is he ‘Vikas Purusha’—the man who delivers economic development? Is he the Chowkidar that watches out for the security of the nation? Is he the devoutly religious Hindu that is proud of Hindu values and practices? Is he the OBC who began from a modest family and whose success represents a triumph of merit over privilege? When Modi publicized

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military retaliation in response to Pakistani intrusions in Kashmir, was he a nationalist leader standing up for Indian security or was he a Hindu nationalist giving Muslims a fitting reply? Modi’s presentation of demonetization—a poorly conceived and implemented policy that imposed sacrifices on wide swathes of the population—graphically illustrates his capacity to fashion multi-faceted issues. The issue was presented as an act to prevent terrorists from using counterfeit money. It was also framed as a programme to combat corruption and black money which the poor and middle class should ‘support even though they were suffering’ because demonetization imposed even greater costs on corrupt elites. Finally, Modi portrayed demonetization as a policy promoting financial development by moving the country towards a cashless economy. The concept of nationalism that is central to the BJP’s appeal is another example of a multivalent issue. Nationalism serves as a recruiting portal for Hindutva. Development is tied to nationalism. Programmes such as Make in India, Skill India, and Startup India promise to enhance India’s global economic power (Palshikar 2018) while Prime Minister Modi exhorts Indians to commit themselves to development plans that would reclaim India’s glorious past accomplishments (Waikar 2018). Prime Minister Modi attracts support from nationalists who are not initially advocates of Hindutva ideology by portraying himself as a strong leader who is effectively restoring India to its rightful place in global leadership. Modi plays the role of a courageous defender of the nation who will give a ‘fitting response’ to aggression against the nation whether it is the Chinese in Doklam or the Pakistanis in Pulwama. Modi and the BJP amplify their appeal to nationalists by associating themselves with emotive symbols such as the flag, national anthem, and slogans such as ‘Jai Hind’.3 At the same time that the BJP is appealing to nationalists, it is identifying the nation with the symbols of Hindutva. Prime Minister Modi attempts to enhance Indian soft power by promoting the International Day of Yoga. While Modi has distanced himself from vigilante cow protectors who have killed 44 people, Modi proclaimed, ‘Cow is our mother. … No one in India can forget the debt of cow’s milk,’ while visiting Vrindavan, a location filled with powerful Hindu symbolism (Beniwal and Parija 2019). The BJP introduces religion as a criterion for citizenship when it passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, to

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deny Indian citizenship to Muslims fleeing religious persecution from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan while granting expedited processing for Hindus and other religious minorities. Former BJP Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj has declared that the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu epic, should be made India’s national book. BJP Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath has determined that miniature replicas of the Taj  Mahal were inappropriate gifts to foreign dignitaries because they ‘were not representative of Indian heritage’ (NDTV 2017). Hindu nationalists have renamed cities, roads, and railway stations replacing names reflecting Muslim historical figures with names reflecting Hindu culture. The network of organizations affiliated with the Hindutva movement enabling it to send out controversial messages while minimizing Modi’s accountability—the third element of multilayered leadership—is another key factor sustaining the prime minister’s popularity. Ever since becoming the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in 2013, Narendra Modi’s rhetoric has been remarkably moderate, incorporating exclusivist Hindutva themes in subtle ways (Waikar 2018). Amit Shah, as president of the BJP, and affiliates of the RSS have projected more strident messages and promoted communal polarization in constituencies where it is politically advantageous. At least until his appointment as Home Minister, Shah and the militant organizations have been more free to engage in controversial strategies since they did not have to compete for electoral majorities in constituencies where polarization would be counterproductive. Cabinet members and other BJP leaders like Yogi Adityanath can articulate militant positions while Modi remains above the fray. Militant organizations whether or not tied to the RSS provide Modi with an active supporting cast of columnists and trolls throughout the media. Social media is particularly conducive to multilayered leadership. WhatsApp groups can spread the Hindutva message, discipline dissident group members, and spread divisive rumors (Sinha 2017). At the same time that multilayered leadership insulates Modi from responsibility for extreme activities, it enables him to use governmental forbearance to facilitate the growth of militant campaigns such as Ghar Wapsi, Love Jihad, Gau Raksha vigilantes, and extremists such as the Sanatan Sanstha even as it provides him the space to condemn their activities when it becomes politically expedient (Jha 2017a, 2017b).

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Does Centrism Still Prevail? In order to understand the dynamics of Indian centrism, it is important to draw a distinction between party system centrism and political system centrism. The former refers to circumstances under which a political party operates in the centre of a party system serving as a focal point for all other parties alliances and strategies. Political system centrism, as elaborated by the Rudolphs, refers to the following characteristics: (1) a pluralistic society and federal institutions that compartmentalize conflict and promote compromise in the process of aggregating interests; (2) checks on executive overreach by autonomous state institutions such as the Supreme Court and the Election Commission, as well as by a vibrant civil society; and (3) the prevalence of a moderate and inclusive political ideology that marginalizes exclusionary class or confessional politics (Rudolph and Rudolph 1980). We contend that party system centrism persists with the BJP at the centre of Indian politics but the trajectory of change under Modi’s leadership is rapidly eroding political system centrism. With its rise to power, the BJP now occupies the centre of India’s party system. Its victories in 282 seats of 542 parliamentary seats in the 2014 elections and 303 seats in the 2019 elections place opposition parties on the margins of India’s national party system. The BJP’s control over the central government means that the BJP sets the country’s political agenda. Its domination of the national party system means that other parties must adjust their strategies for mobilizing votes and building coalitions in response to the BJP’s initiatives. Palshikar (2015) and Vaishnav et al. (2018) convincingly argue that the BJP created India’s second dominant party system after the 2014 general elections. Although centrism shaped the BJP’s rise to power, the BJP has undermined the forces of centrism. According to the centrism thesis, extremist tendencies were mitigated by the pluralism of Indian society as manifested by the localized hierarchies of the caste system and the diversity of regional identities. As is made clear by the BJP’s victories in 2014 and 2019, the party has weakened these identities to a much greater degree than advocates of centrism ever thought possible. Prior to Modi, the BJP’s appeal was limited due to its domination by the upper castes. Under Modi, the OBC’s have been the BJP’s fastest growing constituency (Suri and Verma 2017; Chhibber and Verma 2018). The BJP

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has also been remarkably successful in expanding its support among Dalits and Adivasis (Thachil 2014). These developments have come at the expense of caste-based parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party who it roundly defeated in 2014 and 2019. Of the 120 total parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the BJP’s seats grew from 22 in 2009 to 93 in 2014 and 79 in 2019 largely at the expense of caste-based parties. The BJP has eroded the forces of regionalism. This is especially apparent in the growth of its support in eastern India where the party increased its support in Arunachal Pradesh from no seats in 2009 to all two of the state’s seats in 2019. In Assam, support grew from just three seats in 2009 to nine of the state’s 14 seats in 2019. In Manipur, the BJP had never won a parliamentary seat until 2019 where it won one of the state’s two seats. In Tripura, the BJP did not win a single seat until 2019 when it won the state’s two seats. The BJP has made substantial headway in West Bengal against one of the country’s most deeply entrenched regional parties. In 2009, it won just one of the state’s 42 seats, but in 2019 it won 18. It also expanded its support in Odisha, another state with a strong regional party. After having failed to win any seats in 2009, the BJP won eight of the state’s 21 seats in 2019. The BJP fared less well in the South though it strengthened its position in what has become its bastion in Karnataka increasing its share of the state’s 28 seats from 19 in 2009 to 25 in 2019, and it made a small advance in Telangana where its share of the state’s 17 seats increased from one in 2009 to 4 in 2019. Narendra Modi has brought serious changes to India’s state institutions. His populist leadership has concentrated power in his hands while diminishing the autonomy and power of some of the most critical institutions of the Indian state. These institutions include the Election Commission, the Reserve Bank of India, and the Supreme Court. By diminishing the authority of many of its key institutions, Modi has removed many of the checks that enforce ‘horizontal accountability’ (O’Donnell 1998) and limit the possibility of overreach by the executive branch. The Election Commission of India (ECI) has played a vital role in maintaining the legitimacy of Indian democracy by ensuring that the country’s elections are free and fair. However, in October 2017, it appeared to break with convention to favour the BJP by allowing the BJP government in Gujarat to delay the announcement of state elections

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so it could improve its prospects by announcing new populist schemes designed to increase its popular support. The decision was questioned by former ECI chiefs such as T.S. Krishnamurthy who criticized the delay as an ‘avoidable controversy’ and S.Y. Quraishi who charged that the delay raised ‘serious questions’ (Vaishnav 2018). In January 2018, Chief Election Commissioner A.K. Joti endorsed the Modi government’s legislation to reform campaign finance by permitting ‘electoral bonds’ which enabled anonymous campaign contributions. Jyoti’s endorsement reversed the ECI’s previous opposition to the measure as a ‘retrograde step’ compromising its efforts to promote campaign finance transparency. The ECI’s curious reversal again appeared to succumb to the preferences of the Modi government which was collecting a dominant share of campaign finance (Vaishnav 2018). Proliferation of various media used by political campaigns and the increasingly shrill partisan campaign rhetoric created formidable challenges for the ECI in the 2019 general election. In the eyes of many, the ECI did not seem to be up to the challenge. In the midst of the campaign on April 8, a group of retired bureaucrats and diplomats wrote an open letter to the President of India alleging that the Election Commissions ‘weak kneed conduct’ on a range of issues had led to ‘a crisis of credibility’. Then former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi wrote an op-ed article calling for reforms to depoliticize the appointments of election commissioners by removing authority for appointments from the government to a process of broad-based consultation and to protect commissioners from removal by the government except through a process of impeachment (Quraishi 2019a). As complaints against BJP and opposition campaigns mounted, it took an order from the Supreme Court on April 15, to get the ECI to take action. It issued rulings that penalized the BJP’s Yogi Adityanath and the leader of the opposition Bahujan Samaj Party’s Mayawati for giving speeches violating the ECI’s code of conduct. It also prevented a Bollywood bio-pic of Narendra Modi from being released during the campaign. The ECI’s finding that speeches by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah had not violated the election code raised questions about its independence (Quraishi 2019b). The Modi government has also taken a series of measures which seemed to undermine the autonomy of India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). On 8 November 2016, the Modi government

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suddenly announced a new demonetization policy according to which all 500 and 1,000 rupee currency notes, 86 per cent of all currency in circulation, were immediately withdrawn from circulation. Records show that the government informed the RBI, which had primary responsibility for implementing the drastic measure, just one day before, on 7 November 2016. The RBI’s problematic implementation of demonetization tarnished its reputation for professionalism. In 2018, a series of events gave an even clearer indication that the Modi government was attempting to curtail the RBI’s independence. Although it had agreed to the creation of an independent Monetary Policy Committee to implement inflation targeting, the Modi government pressured the central bank to ease its monetary policy throughout 2018, the year before the spring 2019 general elections. It also let the RBI know that it was unhappy with the central bank’s efforts to clean up public sector bank’s balance sheets by implementing measures that discouraged lending at a time when the government was trying to stimulate the economy. The Modi government began to pressure the RBI to transfer a large sum from its reserves so that it could increase government spending without enlarging the fiscal deficit. When the RBI resisted, the government signaled its dissatisfaction. In August, it appointed to the RBI Board Swaminathan Gurumurthy, former co-convener of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, the economic wing of the RSS, whose unorthodox views has led him to criticize the RBI for being ‘subservient to global thought’ rather than pursuing ‘Indiacentric solutions’ (Kazmin and Mundy 2018). When the RBI continued its resistance prior to an important board meeting in November, the government threatened to invoke Section 7 of the Banking Regulation Act which authorizes it to issue directives in the public interest to the central bank. The RBI made several concessions at the November meeting, but on December 10, RBI governor Urjit Patel abruptly resigned. He was replaced by Shaktikanta Das, a career bureaucrat who, in part because of his role in the demonetization policy as Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, was thought to be more pliable to the will of the government (Economist, 2018b). In the six months since his appointment, Shaktikanta Das has bowed to many of the Modi government’s demands transferring an unusually large dividend to the government, twice lowering interest rates, and taking other measures to stimulate the economy prior to the elections.

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Standard and Poor’s Global issued a statement saying that it viewed Patel’s resignation as a ‘credit negative’, and it warned that ‘sustained and intense external pressure from the Indian government’ could erode central bank autonomy and ‘undermine the long-term financial stability in the country’ (Kapoor 2018). The autonomy of the Indian Supreme Court was also called into question through a series of controversies in 2017 and 2018 (Yamunan 2018). In September 2017, Odisha High Court judge IM Oudussi was arrested when the Central Bureau of Investigation accused him of being involved in improper attempts to influence court orders in favour of a medical college under his jurisdiction. After he was released on bail, public interest litigation seeking a special investigation was filed in November. Justice J. Chelameswar referred the case to a five court Constitution bench. A day later, Chief Justice Dipak Misra nullified Chelameswar’s orders and assembled a new bench which dismissed the litigation and imposed heavy costs on the petitioners. Shortly after, the Supreme Court received a petition to investigate the November 2014 mysterious death of B.H. Loya, a Maharashtra judge. Accusations surfaced in the press regarding the suspicious circumstances around Loya’s death (Takle 2017), and the Supreme Court was petitioned to investigate. Chief Justice Misra appointed himself chair of a junior bench which quickly dismissed the petition. Before his bench announced its decision, on 12 January 2018, a group of four judges who had failed to convince the chief justice to appoint a more senior bench, took the unprecedented step of holding a news conference at which they complained that Misra’s assignment of judges to cases violated the court’s norms and undermined the court’s independence. In April 2018, the Congress, in a historically unprecedented act, moved to impeach Chief Justice Misra, but its petition was rejected by Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu of the BJP. Misra retired on 2 October 2018. The Supreme Court collegium nominated Justice K. M. Joseph of the Uttarakhand High Court for a position on the court, but when the Centre’s BJP government objected to the nomination, many speculated that it was because in March 2016, Joseph had ruled against the government’s decision to impose President’s rule in Uttarakhand. (Yamunan 2018). Joseph finally was appointed to the Supreme Court on 31 July 2018. The erosion of institutional checks on the executive’s authority and the diminishing of caste and regional identities as bases for political

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mobilization would not be so threatening to Indian democracy if it were not for the ideological transformation promoted by the supporters of Hindu nationalism. To the degree that Hindu nationalism undercuts the identities and rights of minorities and jeopardizes the right to dissent, the movement towards Hindutva hegemony is incompatible with democracy. The political theatre of Modi and other BJP leadership has contributed to this transformation. Narendra Modi, for the most part, has only obliquely promoted majoritarianism, for instance, through his exclusive promotion of Hindu achievements in projecting Indian identity and India’s past. The prime minister made less subtle remarks during the 2019 elections. When Rahul Gandhi decided to run from a second parliamentary district as an insurance against the possibility he might lose in his first, Prime Minister Modi mocked Gandhi for running from a district where ‘the majority is in a minority’ implying that Gandhi’s election would be less legitimate if he won with minority support. BJP president Amit Shah declared when he looked at crowds gathered for a campaign rally in Wayanad, he could not tell whether they were Indians or Pakistanis (Indian Express, 2019b). At another point, the BJP president described undocumented Muslim migrants from Bangladesh as ‘termites’, and he promised to throw them into the Bay of Bengal (Ghoshal 2019). The rhetorical marginalization of Muslims from India’s national identity has important consequences for their political rights. Hindu nationalists have in some instances succeeded in imposing constraints on Muslims religious practice as in the rapidly growing city of Gurgaon, just outside of New Delhi, where they restricted the provision of places for Muslim worship and then agitated against Muslims praying in public spaces (Safi 2019). The BJP’s passage of the controversial Citizen (Amendment) Act 2019 denies Indian citizenship to Muslims fleeing religious persecution from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan while granting expedited processing for Hindus and other religions minorities. It challenges the secular ideals of Indian nationhood by making religion a criterion for citizenship. The Act implies that India should be a ‘Hindu’ homeland that affords a ‘right of return’ to fellow Hindus and other minorities but not Muslims. Modi himself has referred to the Act as ‘atonement’ for partition politics (The Hindu, 4 January 2019). Since the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance assumed control over India’s central government, there has arisen a violent campaign by

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vigilante groups against beef consumption and trade. From May 2015 through December 2018, Human Rights Watch reports that at least 44 people—36 of them Muslims—were killed across 12 Indian states, and some 280 people were injured in over 100 different incidents across 20 states. Police action often made matters worse. Human Rights Watch noted, ‘In almost a third of the cow-related vigilante killings since 2015, police filed cases against victims or witnesses. In some cases, witnesses turned hostile because of threats from the police or from the accused and their supporters. At times the police were complicit in the death of the victim and tried to cover up the crime’ (Human Rights Watch 2019, 1, 27). More generally, according to government reports, between 2014 and 2017 there has been a 28 per cent rise in reported cases of communal violence, including an alarming number of public lynchings by mob or vigilante groups (Gowen and Sharma 2018). The scripts used in the BJP’s political theatre have promoted a brand of Hindu majoritarianism that attempts to delegitimize political dissent as ‘anti-national’. The Modi government and the RSS affiliated student group the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) used this approach to discredit student protests on 9 February 2016 at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi where student leaders were arrested on charges of sedition. Ultimately, bail was granted due to lack of evidence, but the government took reprisals against some JNU faculty who criticized its actions (Basu 2018). Prime Minister Modi went to great lengths to discredit the opposition Congress Party. When the Congress manifesto called for the repeal of India’s colonial-era sedition laws, Prime Minister Modi, rather than debating the issue on its merits, dismissed it with the charge, ‘Pakistan too wants this. It wants free hand for those who want to work against India’ (Business Line 2019). After Rahul Gandhi and other Congress leaders began to raise questions about the Indian Air Force’s strike on Balakot, Modi branded them ‘poster boys of Pakistan’ (Times of India 2019). Modi’s stance empowered subordinates in the BJP to use more extreme rhetoric. BJP minister for Rural Development, Women and Child Development in Maharashtra, Pankaja Munde, responded to Rahul Gandhi’s questioning of the Balakot strike by urging that ‘a bomb should be tied around Rahul Gandhi’s neck and then he should be sent to another country’ (Times of India 2019b). Critics outside the main opposition parties have fared even worse. Internationally recognized activists such as Anand Teltumbde have been arrested and charged with

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being ‘urban Maoists’ (Masih 2019) and outspokenly critical journalists like Gauri Lankesh have been assassinated inciting on-line celebrations by Hindu extremists (Kazim 2017). In sum, under Modi and the BJP, India has moved much further away from a centrist political system on each of the three dimensions of centrism than any of the advocates of the centrist thesis could have predicted. Under Modi’s political leadership, the BJP has been remarkably successful in overcoming the constraints on majoritarianism imposed by India’s social pluralism. The autonomy of political institutions and civil society that has historically constrained executive power has been diminished. The BJP and RSS have succeeded in promoting an exclusive version of Hindu nationalism that has eroded minority rights. *** The Rudolphs’ intellectual legacy bequeaths two key concepts that help us to understand the present and likely future trajectory of change in contemporary Indian politics. First, Indian politics is shaped by the manner in which its pluralistic society and political institutions promote centrism. Second political leadership characterized by political theatre and organization can be a transformative political force. The Rudolphs, like most scholarly analysis of centrism and political leadership, rarely incorporate both of these concepts into their political analysis. We contend that it is a mistake to dichotomize them because at the same time that centrism may limit the viable strategies available to political leaders, political leaders can pursue strategies that transform the constraints of centrism. We cannot understand the strategic choices of Indian political leaders and the outcomes of their strategies without considering the constraints posed by centrism, and we cannot understand the constraints of centrism without considering how they have been shaped by the strategies of political leadership. The Rudolphs’ analysis of political leadership highlights the role of political theatre and political organization. It privileges political theatre and underscores its importance as a force shaping political discourse. The metaphor of theatre is particularly appropriate since it highlights the strategic nature of leadership by suggesting that the scripts leaders follow are designed to have a particular impact on their audience. The interpretive approach illuminates how scripts presented in the theatre

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shape people’s understandings not only through their provision of meanings and motives, but also through their appeals to the heart. In an era where populism has spread far and wide across countries around the world, the emotional dimension of political leadership is more important than ever. Chhibber and Verma (2018) point out that scholars tend to view political leaders as either transactional or transformational. Similarly, most analysts tend to focus on either the communicative or organizational aspects of political leadership. Our application of the concept of multilayered leadership demonstrates that it is important not to obscure the complementarity between the communicative and organizational dimensions. In a world where leaders can perform distinct scripts for different audiences and where the performances of leaders are polyvalent, the complementarity of political theatre and political organization has two important consequences. First, political organization can contribute to the construction of charisma. Weberian notions of charisma attribute it to a leader’s extraordinary personal qualities such as inspirational oration and acute psychological empathy and bonding with their audience. Charismatic leaders like Narendra Modi possess many of these qualities. However, charisma is greatly enhanced by the manner in which supportive political organizations collect information that increases the leader’s understanding of her constituencies and effectively project the leader’s message to the public. This is especially true in the era of social media. The second consequence of multilayered leadership is that it can greatly facilitate structural change in politics and society. As illustrated by the case of Narendra Modi and the forces of extreme Hindu nationalism, by creating a division of labor between a leader, other leaders, and diverse political organizations, multilayered leadership facilitates transformational change in a democratic political system by enabling leaders like Modi to play the role of a strong but relatively moderate leader while freeing other actors in the network of Hindu nationalist organizations to engage in radical and transformative activities with minimal negative political consequences. The BJP’s occupation of the centre of India’s party system has changed Indian democracy just as changes in Indian democracy have facilitated the rise of the BJP. Insightful political scientists such as Chhibber and Verma (2018) and Kapur (2019) find that at the same

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time the BJP has ascended to power, Indian democracy has become more majoritarian and authentically Indian in the sense that it better reflects the values of the non-elites in India’s towns and villages than the sensibilities of a smaller group of cosmopolitan liberal elites. The argument is consistent with the Rudolphs’ contention that a country’s modernization is shaped by its distinctive societal contexts. Rather than undergoing a teleological process in which all countries’ destination is a singular modernity, the Rudolphs show that our world is characterized by countries following distinctive trajectories of change leading to a pluralism of modernities. Thomas Hansen (1999, 173) reminds us that majoritarian democracy displaces the democratic principle of ad hoc electoral majorities with domination by a pre-given majority. The Rudolph’s interpretive analysis warns us that to naturalize the majority that is being created by Hindutva ideology and organizations is to obscure the contextually contingent process through which the politics of Modi and Hindutva created this majority. It is also to conceal the ongoing transformation of Hinduism that has replaced the earlier ‘loose, open, and diverse web of local and regional sectarian groupings defined by a sacred geography of places and events, deities and temples’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1993) with a demand for conformity to newly reformulated practices while at the same time redefining non-Hindu religious groups as threats to the newly constructed Hindu community (Vora and Palshikar 1990; Thapar 1989). The optimism of the Rudolphs’ analysis of Indian politics underestimated the capacity of the forces of Hindu nationalism to use the structures and institutions of India to fashion an illiberal political trajectory. At the same time, their focus on the constructive agency of leadership encourages us to see the potential for altering the trajectory of illiberal change.

Endnotes 1. We would like to thank Milan Vaishnav for pointing out that Modi’s strategy should be traced back to this date. 2. An alternative interpretation of these events proposes that Modi did not attempt to distance himself from the events in Gujarat, indeed his use of Hindu symbolism was strategically deployed as religious political theater to consolidate majoritarian support.

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3. For instance, in 2016, Modi’s government made it mandatory for central universities to fly the national flag. In 2015, the Modi government’s Home Ministry issued an order directing audiences to stand at attention whenever the national anthem is sung or played. BJP governments in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have made it compulsory for students to respond to roll calls by saying ‘Jai Hind’.

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Thachil, Tariq. 2014. Elite Parties, Poor Voters: How Social Services Win Votes in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thapar, Romila. 1989. ‘Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity’. Modern Asian Studies 23 (2): 209–31. Times of India. 2019a. ‘PM Modi Calls Opposition “Poster Boys of Pakistan”; Congress Says Don't Politicise Armed Forces’. 5 March. Available at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/pm-modi-calls-oppn-posterboys-of-pak-cong-says-dont-politicise-armed-forces/articleshow/68274430. cms. Last accessed on 7 March 2019. ———. 2019b. ‘“Should Tie a Bomb to Rahul Gandhi and Send Him to Another Country”: Pankaja Munde’. 22 April. Available at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/elections/lok-sabha-elections-2019/maharashtra/news/reservations-wont-be-scrapped-till-i-am-here-pm-narendra-modi-in-maharashtra/ articleshow/68989674.cms. Last accessed on 29 May 2019. Vaishnav, Milan. 2018. ‘India’s Elite Institutions Are Facing a Credibility Crisis’. Live Mint, 20 February. Available at https://www.livemint.com/ Opinion/vvPejHxB52AVzqQBRLoIWL/Indias-elite-institutions-are-facing-acredibility-crisis.html. Last accessed on 12 February 2019. Vaishnav, Milan, and Reedy Swanson. 2015. ‘Does Good Economics Make for Good Politics? Evidence from Indian States’. India Review 14 (3): 279–311. Vaishnav, Milan, Jayaram Ravi, and Jamie Hintson. 2018. ‘Is the BJP India’s New Hegemon?’ Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 8 October. Available at https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/10/08/is-bjpindia-s-new-hegemon-pub-77406 on December 10, 2018. Last accessed on 28 February 2020. Varadarajan, Siddharth. 2019. ‘#PollVault: For Modi and Shah, Rhetoric on Surgical Strikes, “Infiltrators” a Key Prop’. The Wire, 29 March. Available at https://thewire.in/politics/pollvault-from-modi-shah-rhetoric-on-surgicalstrikes-infiltrators-a-key-prop. Last accessed on 2 April 2019. Viswanathan, Shiv. 2014. ‘A Roadshow to Remember’. The Hindu, 29 April. Available at https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/a-roadshow-toremember/article5956987.ece. Last accessed on 7 January 2019. Vora, Rajendra, and Suhas Palshikar. 1990. ‘Neo-Hinduism: Case of Distorted Consciousness’. In State and Society in India, edited by Jayant Lele and Rajendra Vora, 213–43. Delhi: Chanakya. Vyas, Mahesh. 2019. ‘11 Million Jobs Lost in 2018’. Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, 8 January. Available at https://www.cmie.com/kommon/bin/sr.p hp?kall=warticle&dt=2019-01-08%2009:28:37&msec=666. Last accessed on 17 May 2019.

Centrism, Political Leadership, and the Future of Indian Politics

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Index

abolition of jagirs process 225 Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme 135 Adityanath, Yogi 340, 343 Adivasis 319, 322, 334, 338, 342 advanced industrialization 96 Agarwala, Rina 9–10, 170–201, 322 Agency 6, 11, 12, 14, 28, 33, 36–7, 38, 45, 65, 67, 74, 94, 105, 106, 171, 173, 197, 225, 242, 243, 244, 262, 320, 350 agrarian 31, 125, 126, 128, 171, 172, 174, 176, 192, 329 mobilization 8–9, 136, 154, 179, 321–2 proletariat 191 revolts 190 rural structures 130 unions 175 agricultural labourers 148, 178 agriculture in India, transformation after 1947 Green Revolution impact on 192–3 types of development strategies 125

ahimsa 37, 326 Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) 347 All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) 13, 283, 285–6, 289, 292 altruism 7, 37, 39, 45, 95, 101–4, 110, 114–15 altruists 102–4, 115 Ambedkar, B. R. 299, 332 Article 370 330 Assam 216, 338, 342 autonomy 25, 85, 172, 174, 175, 220, 326, 328–9 and accountability, tension between 290 higher education institutes in India 13, 266–73, 278, 281, 283–4, 289–92 of political institutions and civil society 348 working-class power in West Bengal 175 Ayodhya 247

Index

backward castes/classes 22, 29, 127, 275, 299, 322 identities 312 Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) 153, 342 Balakot air strike 347 Basu, Amrita 11, 12, 33, 37, 239–63, 325 Bhagavad Gita 340 Bharat and India distinction 10, 33, 126, 128, 190, 193, 197 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 15, 32, 132, 134, 154–5, 181, 241, 306, 315n12, 319, 332–3, 336–7, 347–8, 350, 351n3. See also Modi, Narendra (NaMo); Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) adopted Gandhian socialism as party ideology 264 announced Modi as prime ministerial candidate in 2013 329–30 appeal prior to Modi 342 association with CAG 334–5 campaign against corruption 331 by vigilante groups against beef consumption and trade 347 corporate donations received by 333 election manifesto of 2014 258 expenditure incurred in 2019 election campaign 333 former military personnel appointment after 2014 and 2019 elections victory 308–10 hired international marketing companies for campaign 331 incite violence in various constituencies 338 political theatre 347

361

rise in number of seats from 2009 to 2019 342 victory in 2014 and 2019 general elections 329, 341 Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS) 128, 132–35, 147, 156n10, 195 Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) 128, 135 Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) 181 Brahmanical Hinduism 245 Brexit vote 78 British colonialism 241, 263n4 military transitions from 302 bullock capitalists 8, 22, 154, 156n2, 171, 177, 322 class-for-itself 189–93 and decline in average size of land holding 130 demand of quotas for dominant castes 137–8 political bargain on prices and subsidies 192–3 mobilization of 191 politics of recognition 171 as producers 322–3 reason for success of 128 revived Bharat vs India cultural frame 10 social category of 214 of twenty-first century 137 victory in getting debt and tax relief for farmers 200 bureaucracy 24, 46n3 deinstitutionalization impact of 25 modern 25 social mobility in 129 capitalism Indian 7 outside 178

362

Index

cashless economy 339 caste associations 8, 22, 25, 42, 212, 321 caste-based parties 342 caste(s) in India 156n6 comeback in political economy of rural India in 1990s 129 constituents of oppressive social hierarchies 19 dominant 129 rise of backward caste 29 as status hierarchies 32 central universities 288–9 centrism/centrist Indian state 176, 200, 211, 214, 220, 320 and Indian politics 321–3, 341 social pluralism 213 chowkidar 253–4 Citizen (Amendment) Act 2019 340, 347–8 Citizens for Accountable Government (CAG) 334–5 civilian–military relations 13–14 assessment of dangers 307–8 India’s success in management of 305–7 military heroes involvement in politics 308–10 military radically enclaved in political environment 310–13 Rudolphs’ work on 298–305 class(es) 230n11 -based political parties 217 politics 323 clients of the state 174 compromise 173 conflict 25 consciousness 173 defined 173 exclusionary language of 216

formation 215 identities 171–2, 176, 179, 186, 198, 200, 214 interests 59 for itself 151 language of 215, 225 less politically powerful 214 mobilization 9, 173, 321–2 industrial labourers closeness to 323 political power of 214 political–cultural languages of 225 politics 128, 174, 176, 197–201, 217 popular, power of 175 power 175 reconceptualization of 215 as a social relationship 171 structuration 32, 218 structure 173 success in capturing state power 174 transformation 170 classical liberalism xx cognitive 34, 38, 86, 89, 97, 109, 116 beliefs 7, 85 categorization 105 frames 76 menus 106 scientists 114 validity 85 collective action 172, 176 communal 100, 313 atrocities 312 conflicts 312 groups 103 polarization 340 riots 310, 316n22 tensions 307 violence 99, 101, 347 virus 315n19

Index

Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) 175, 218, 336 constitutional democracy xx contemporary political analysis, characteristics of 3 context 20–3, 27–9, conventional view 28 and meaning-making 39–40 and situated knowledge 30 and action 35–6 contradictory class positions 31, 172, 178, 179, 187, 201 cotton manufacturing/production in India 193–7, 200 critical realism 65 Cuban missile crisis 61 cultural diversity 321 frames 59 identity(ies) 32, 207, 212–14, 216–19, 225, 227 institutions 76 mobilization of Bharat vs India 190 pluralism 36, 323 politics 207, 218–19 culture(s) 4–5, 10–11, 19, 21, 27, 30, 37, 39, 45, 57, 59, 61, 68–70, 76–7, 102, 106, 208, 210, 212–21, 223, 225, 227–8 Anglo 121n23 -based frames 78 defined 34 and inequality, link between 212 institutional 229 public 222 Rudolphs’ conceptualization of 28 shaped both political action and subjectivities 211

363

Dalits 8, 129–30, 154–5, 319, 322, 332 Das, Shaktikanta 344 Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) 116, 121n26 deductive approach 4 deliberation, Habermas’ approach to 326–7 demand groups politics 8, 31–2, 196, 220, 322–3 democracy 240–1, 252–4, 259–61 deliberative 82 direct 239 in India 172, 197 liberal 241, 261, 319 majoritarian 350 modern 33 democratization 19, 22, 24, 267, 274–8 disciplinary enterprises 62, 64 discourse(s) 5–7, 38–9, 73, 75, 77–9, 83, 222–4 anthropological 232n27 coalitions 80 collective 82 communicative 81, 89 coordinative 80–1, 89 interactive processes of coordination 80 media 59 orientalist 209 political 221, 328, 348 power of 84–8 discursive exchange 38 institutionalists 77, 84 interaction 73 discursive institutionalism 38–9, 53–4, 88–9. See also new institutionalism defined 6–7, 73, 78–82 features of 7

364

Index

ideas and discourse 74–5 institutional context in 82–4 power of ideas and discourse 84–8 domestic workers’ movements 187 dominant castes, concept of 129, 155 Lorenz curves for per capita income of caste groups Gujarat 151 Haryana 151 Maharashtra 150 origin of 156n5 quotas demand by. See quotas demand by dominant caste in India. socio-economic differentiation among 32, 149–54 vs performance of SCs and OBCs 139–40 access to education 143–4 education completed by castes 144–7 job sector scenario 146–9 level of income 140–1 economic liberalization 131–2, 205, 325 economic reforms 133, 205, 221–2, 230, 283, 285, 289 economic relations 31 education–politics relationship 278 education system in India 267–83. See also politics in India Election Commission of India (ECI) 283, 337, 341 delay in announcing Gujarat elections in 2017 340–1 and political campaigns in 2019 343 electoral mobilization 322

strength of disadvantaged groups 322 elite leadership 73 emotion(s) 20, 34, 36–8, 41, 45, 69, 99, 103, 105–6, 120n12, 244, 251, 309 individual 89 in politics 97 role in discourse 39 emotional 112, 114 appeals 250 dimension of political leadership 349 resilience 111 survival 111 traumas 110 entrepreneurial politicians 275 entrepreneurs 80–1, 105, 171, 183, 186, 269 policy 325 politico-educational 284 epistemic communities 80 ethical perspective 108–9 ethics 109–12 ethnic 103, 197–8, 212, 214 affiliation 191 balancing 304 cleansing 99, 107, 113 communities of workers 215 composition of Indian Army 299 conflict 242 fragmentation 323 loyal groups 302 violence 98–9 ethnicity 29, 217–18 ethnographic methods 218 sensibilities 40 thick description 211 extra-agricultural economy 192

Index

fatalism 111, 117, 120n19 federalism, Indian 132, 272, 300, 303–4, 323 federal market economy 325 film PM Narendra Modi 337 Uri: The Surgical Strike 35 Gandhi, Indira 127, 277, 305, 312 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma Gandhi) xxvii, 11–12, 23, 33, 87, 98, 216, 251–2, 255, 257–61, 320 appropriated from religious traditions on subcontinent 326 assassination by Hindu nationalist 246 created modern mass movement 22–3 creative appropriation of Indian culture 325–6 on democracy 259–61 importance of cleanliness 258 modernity of tradition 42 moral salience and moral imagination 36 personality as a leader 239–41 physical comportment 254 political genius 328 theatre 37, 324–7 power of moral imagination 101 public discourse of independent India 216 rejected Western civilizational values 256 religious practices to caste associations 211–12 Rudolphs’ work on charismatic leadership qualities of 82, 241–6, 261–3

365

self-presentation 326 strategy of civil disobedience 325 satyagraha 34, 36–7, 326–7 use of cultural symbols 37 on village panchayats 327 vision of universal humanity 103 Gandhi, Rahul 253, 331, 336, 346, 347–8 ‘Gau Raksha’ vigilantes 340 gender 19, 29, 32, 40, 43, 57, 74, 172, 184, 187, 198–200, 212, 217 genetically modified organisms (GMOs) 194 genocide(s) 7, 39, 98, 101, 103, 106–10, 113 ‘Ghar Wapsi’ 340 globalization 172, 239, 255, 261 Green Revolution 128, 192 Gurumurthy, Swaminathan 344 higher education institutions (HEIs) in India 13, 283. See also politicization of educational institutions; University Grants Commission (UGC) academic freedom during NDA government 282 attack on education commissions for elitism 295n16 enrolment ratio in 273 National Policy on Education, See National Policy on Education number of colleges and universities by 2016–17 273 owned by entrepreneurial politicians 275 politicization of institutions 274–8 Supreme Court cases on 293–4n7 technical education, privatization of 285

366

Index

university appointments, features of 282 University Education Commission. See University Education Commission (known as Radhakrishnan Commission of 1948–9) vacancies in 273 Hindu culture 340 extremists 348 majoritarianism 347 nationalism 219, 246, 261, 332–3, 346, 349–50 nationalists 330, 340, 346 traditionalists 330, 332, 336 Hindutva 3, 39, 224, 257, 322 hegemony 346 militants 5, 320, 333 historical institutionalism 73, 74–7 hybridity 26, 228 ideas affect discourse 38 cognitive 80 normative 80 power of 84–8 ideational power, features of 7, 85–8 identity(ies), concept of 26–7, 35–6, 77, 84, 96–8, 103, 106–7, 198, 208, 222, 224, 230n11, 242, 244–5, 252–3, 256, 300, 306 ascriptive 172, 198 backward castes 312 -based theory of moral choice 108–9 caste 130, 155 formation 40–2, 57, 226 group 19, 43 Indian national 346

informal workers 183 multiple 32, 199 national 313 neo-middle class 222, 223 non-class 172, 200 political 21 politics 69, 99, 120n22 regional 321, 341, 346 imperialism of categories 4, 19, 55–6, 61, 210, 226 income distribution across caste groups Gujarat 165–7 Haryana 168–9 Maharashtra 162–4 Indian Army 302, 313 growth since Independence 310 Indian National Army (INA) 300–2 Indian National Congress (INC)/ Congress Party 37, 136, 155, 251, 300 dominance Indian party system from 1947–89 323, 329 political organization 328 transformation by Mahatma Gandhi 328 Indo-China war of 1962 301, 303 informal labour/workers 178, 183, 201n1 informal sector 31, 148, 214, 217, 322–3 In Pursuit of Lakshmi. The Political Economy of the Indian State (Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph) xxvii, 127–8, 130, 154, 156n6, 170, 173–5, 179, 181, 185, 197, 205–13, 220, 225–6, 228–9, 231n13, 300–1, 304–5, 314n2 interest representation 321 interpretative analysis 19, 43 framework 45, 96

Index

mode of enquiry 58 reflexivity 43–4 interpretivism for methodology, implications of 39–44 interview(s)/interviewing/ interviewees xv–xvii, 41–2, 107, 109, 112–14, 121n26, 182, 253, 257, 301–2 effect 46n10 importance of 6 interpretive 109 narrative 110 off-the-record 300 serial 41–2 IT industry 285–6 Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) 282–3, 347 jobless growth 129 khilafat/Khilafat Movement in India (1919–24) 37, 46n12 kisan/famers mobilizations, reasons for 131 agitation against minimum support price 135–6 agriculture, slow growth of 131–2 farmers mobilization on various events 136 loan waiving 136 low wages and high food prices 132 peasant movements 132 reform in Gujarat electricity sector and its impact on farmers 132–7 rural-urban gap 131 politics 130 Kishor, Prashant 334

367

large landowners 156n2 leadership charismatic 82, 98, 239–41, 251, 320 political 45, 99–101, 305, 319–20, 324–8, 348–9 liminality, concept of 35–6 reflections on 225–9 linguistic theory 107 literacy 98 literary narratives 42–3 Lockean Universalism 21, 56 ‘love jihad’ 340 lower-class politics 176 macro political economy 170 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) 132, 154, 156n9, 184, 193 majoritarianism 313, 329, 346, 347, 348, 350 ‘Make In India’ programme 330, 339 Malviya, Amit 337 Mandal moment 129–30 Marxian class theory 21, 220 mass credentialization 274 mobilization 12, 30, 46n12, 174 meaning defined 35–6 formation 36 agency and leadership 36–7 discourse and emotion 38–9 methodological holism 58 individualism 58, 210 middle peasantry 175 militant organizations 324

368

Index

military insulation from political society 285–6 Ministry of Defence 15, 302 Ministry of Education 277 Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) 13, 277, 280–1, 286, 289 mobilization 35, 98, 176, 198, 221 citizen 73 class. See class mobilization of demand groups 195, 220 electoral 322 farmer 192 horizontal 130, 321 mass. See mass mobilization political 10, 19, 22–4, 113–14, 191, 200, 217, 219, 223, 311, 321, 346 unified 130 urban 194 vertical 321 working-class 218 modernity 56–7 global 20 India’s distinctive path of 218 pluralism 20 of tradition 42, 68–9, 97, 193–7 modernization theory 56–7 Modi, Narendra (NaMo) 11–12, 33, 39, 132–5, 154, 196, 239, 246, 248, 263n4, 329–30, 342, 344–5, 349. See also Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma Gandhi); Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 2014 general elections campaign 14, 330, 331 2019 general elections campaign 14, 253, 335–6

able to deploy aspirational middle-class language 223–4 brings changes in state institutions 340–6 ‘Chai Pe Charcha’ talk show 331–2, 334 combined post-liberalization language of reforms with older languages 223 contest election from Varanasi (Benaras) 332–3 crafted multilayered leadership strategy 320 criticise UPA government for jobless growth 330 demonetization of currency and its impact 136, 339, 344 distanced from vigilante cow protectors 339 forces of Hindutva 337 identify as master of security issues 335–6 invocation of Mahatma Gandhi 257–9 limited RSS activities during Gujarat CM 334 mandatory to fly national flag in 2015 351n3 multilayered leadership qualities of 15, 337–8 neo–middle class identity 223 perception about democracy 259–61 political liability 332, 351n2 promotion of Hindu achievements 346 role as architect of rapid growth of Gujarat 330 Rudolphs’ charismatic leadership/ personality qualities of 239–41, 248–57, 259–63

Index

'Vikas Purush’ or ‘Development Man’ 330–1, 338 yoga, promotion of 339 moral authority 327 choice 103–8 economy 40 salience 34, 36–7, 83, 97, 106, 109 moral imagination, concept of 7, 23, 36, 79, 83, 89, 96–7, 116, 119n8, 243, 247 multilayered leadership 320, 327, 329, 337–8, 340, 349 multiplicities of interpretation 40 Muslim League 336 Muslim migrants 346 mutual constitution process 32, 35, 39, 216, 225 narrative analysis/interpretation 42–3, 112–15 National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government 14, 250, 282, 309 nationalism, concept of 213, 219, 247, 339 National Policy on Education 1968 276–7 1986 277–8 2016 (T.S.R. Subramanian Committee) 279–81, 289–90 National Register of Citizens (NRC) 339 Nehru, Jawaharlal xv–xvii, 120n22, 133, 216, 300, 302, 325 class formation project 224 non-alignment policy of 303 neo-institutionalisms 73, 78 neoliberalism 72, 179, 239, 250, 255, 262 neo-middle class 154 new agrarianism 8, 22, 128, 190, 322

369

new institutionalism. See also discursive institutionalism importance of institutions 74 origin of 73–4 rejected political action reduction 74 response to absence of institutional analysis 74 non-agricultural labour/workers 178 non-antagonistic dominant classes 174 non-farm jobs 138 North-West Frontier 299 old institutionalism 55 ‘One Rank One Pension’ (OROP) 14, 306–7, 315n12 Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 8–9, 138, 154–5, 190–1, 274, 319, 342. See also dominant castes, concept of mobilization to get reservation/ quotas 129–30, 137 Pakistan 340, 346 Pakistan army comprising mostly from Punjabis and Pashtuns 299 dominated by politics 298 Paramilitary Forces in India 310 Partition of India and Pakistan 99–100 party system centrism 341 perceptions, importance of 105–6 Perestroika movement xxiv–xxv, 6, 116 pluralism 59, 220, 250 centrist-oriented social 213 of culture 35 of Indian society 341 involuted 181

370

Index

methodological 6, 45, 60, 63, 74, 206–7 of methods 54, 62, 54, 77 of modernities 350 of perspectives on reality 61 state-dominated 323 political action 35, 39, 211 actors 268 advantage 99–100 affiliations 269 analysis, interpretive approach to xxv, 27–35 communication 78 contemporary trends 219 change and leadership 320 culture 205 democracy 180 labourers outnumber surplus farmers 190 development 24, 100–1 feuds 270 identity 215 institutions 14, 323 interference 274, 282 liberalism 37 mobilization. See political mobilization patronage 277 power 170 psychology 97–100, 109–13, 115–16 representation 192 resources 275 sociology 127 subjectivities 211 theatre 37, 320, 324–9, 335, 346–9 scripts 12, 15, 37, 324–7, 337, 347–9 religious 351n2

trauma 109–12 organization 320, 328, 348 violence 100–1 political economy of India 10, 32, 35, 127, 205–32 historical formation of 216 intellectual challenges in study of 225–9 and middle classes in postliberalization 211–15 and relationship between politics and culture 113–14 state and class 212–21 political leader(s)/leadership 6, 13, 14, 36, 45, 99–100, 218, 324–9. See also Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma Gandhi); Modi, Narendra charismatic 23–4, 320 construction of 329–41 mobilization by 24 and moral imagination 101–3 role of charisma in 99 Rudolphs’ perspective/study on 324–9, 348–9 transformative potential of 23 to use emotional appeals for socially destructive objectives 38 political parties 25, 31–3, 175–6, 181, 186, 196, 200, 205, 214, 217, 224, 259, 278, 307–9, 321, 323, 328, 333, 341 political relations, concept of 31–2 political science 6, 20, 26, 53, 88, 116, 227, 242 behaviouralism and rational choice in 58–60 interpretative analysis of 6 and interpretivism 73 methodological wars in 54

Index

philosophy of science and social science, debate and their implications 60–2 in post-war era 54–5 Rudolphs’ intervention in 219–20 systems approaches to 55–8 valorization of rational actor models 206 political scientific scholarship, on Indian political economy 206 political scientists 43, 45, 54, 60–1, 65, 72, 78, 84, 89, 267 behaviourist 63 engagement in theoretical debates 55 investigation of reality create human connections 96 non-behaviourist 63 and philosophy of science 64 systemic 58 political system centrism 341 politicization of educational institutions 267–72, 274–8. See also higher education institutions (HEIs) in India politics centres, Marxian analysis of 171 populism 39, 128, 241, 250, 259–61 positionality of researcher 6, 43–4 positivist scholarship 28, 43, 44, 46n10 post-truth politics 71 poverty 101 in India, failure of leaders to mobilize poor 173 micro- or macro-causes of 174 pervasiveness of 172 pracharaks 249, 254 psychic altruism 104 public conversations 82 expenditure on education 294n11

371

philosophies 79 sentiments 79 Pulwama terrorist attack (February 2019) 335, 339 quotas, demand by dominant caste in India 129–30, 137–8 radical relativism 59, 61 radicalism 261, 322–3 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 12, 132–3, 137, 240–1, 253–4, 295n13, 320, 333–4, 337–8, 340, 344, 347–8 created akharas (gymnasiums) and shakhas (training camps) 247 cultivate moral authority 246–7 and Mahatma Gandhi, similarities between 247–8 perception about Indian Muslims as second-class citizens 248 rational choice theory 104, 210 institutionalism 74–6 institutionalists 73 reciprocal altruism 102 reflexive approach and positivism 43–4 regional backlash 313 conflicts 307, 312 fragmentation 323 identities 321, 341, 346 sectarian groupings 350 religion(s) 29, 103, 105, 112, 212, 214, 216–17, 221, 243–8, 256–7, 304, 308

372

Index

cultural politics of 207 ideologies 213 spiritual truths of 59 as status hierarchies 32 stratifies working-class communities 215 religious 59, 107, 220, 250 appeal of BJP 332 communities founding colleges 268 devotion 239 faiths 239 festivals 217 feuds 270 groupings 321–2 ideologies 113 leaders 328 minorities 346 parties 322 persecution 340 rituals 217 symbolism 337 violence 100 reservations of caste 130, 137, 139, 143, 148, 150, 155, 299 Reserve Bank of India (RBI) 342, 344–5 rich-poor 173 paradox of India 214 rigorous partiality 40–1 Rudolph, Lloyd I. xv–xxxi, xxxiii, 3, 19–27, 31–45, 46n6, 53–61, 65, 67–9, 82, 96–118, 127–30, 137, 155n1, 170–6, 178–80, 189, 191, 196–201, 206–16, 221–2, 224–9, 241–6, 248–60, 266–86, 289, 292–3n1, 294n8, 298–303, 303n1, 304n2, 319–29, 341, 348, 350

Rudolph, Susanne H. xv–xxxi, 3, 8, 19–27, 31–45, 46n6, 53–60, 65, 67–9, 82, 87, 96–118, 127–30, 137, 155n1, 170–6, 178–80, 189, 191, 196–201, 206–16, 221–2, 224–9, 241–6, 248–60, 266–86, 289, 291, 294n8, 298–303, 303n1, 304n2, 319–29, 341, 348, 350 Sabarimala temple issue, Kerala 336–7 Samajwadi Party 129, 341 Scheduled Castes (SCs) 139 Second Word War (World War II) 107–8, 298, xviii Armenian genocide during 110 self-employed workers/labour 182, 176 defined 177–8 exploited by urban formal workers 188 new counter-movements and mobilization 184–9 and role of state 178–84 urban workers 199 Shah, Amit 329–30, 340, 343, 346 Sikh movement in 1980s 29, 311 Singh, Amar xxviii, 42–3, 57, 69, 98, 121n23, 226, 228 Singh, Manmohan 129, 139 situated knowledge, concept of 5, 20, 44–5, 54, 70, 89, 190 from 1950s to 1970s 54–70 creation of 39 and culture 34–5, 82 defined 3–4, 19 and economic relations 31 emphasis on place 33–4 features of 30 figure of 29 implications for theory building 4

Index

interpretive approach of 82, 84 and interpretive political analysis 4, 27–39 interpretive approach to 53–5 and place 33 and political relations 31 role in social science analysis 19 and social relations 29 and time 32–3 understanding of world 4–5 ways of working 53 situational truths 37 social change 42, 242 complexity 20 constructivism 206 diversity 322 identities 171, 176 interaction 7 media 14, 255, 312, 333, 336, 337, 340, 349 mobilization 41, 81–2 pluralism 14, 36, 321, 322, 348 structures 173 social relations, concept of defined 29 interrelated hierarchies 29–30 mutually constitutive 32 social science 6, 7, 19, 22, 25–7, 40–1, 54–5, 60, 114 debates in philosophy of 67–72 implication on political science 60–2 intersubjective 59 investigation of perceptions of reality create human connections 97 paradigm-guided 66 scientific 64 subjective 55, 59

373

sociological institutionalism 64, 76–7 institutionalists 73, 76 socio-tropic voting 103 state(s) autonomy 25 Indian 9 from 1947 to late-1980s 173–4 political economy of 205 organization 59 Rudolphs’ 174 -sponsored media 34 as third actor 25, 175, 323 weak-strong character of 197 Weberian 174 status groups 129–30, 191, 321 engage in collective action 21 importance in rural India 22 political salience of 321–2 subjective knowledge, in social science analysis 40 subjectivity 21, 61, 84 Supreme Court of India 138, 249, 270, 283, 287, 293n7, 307, 336, 341–3, 345–6 surplus farmers 189–90, 192 theory-building 26 traditional authority 24 caste organization 33 Twitter 253, 331, 336, 337, 354 United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government 306–7, 330–1 universal knowledge 53 University Education Commission (known as Radhakrishnan Commission of 1948–9) 278–9, 289–90, 293n2

374

Index

University Grants Commission (UGC) 13, 277, 283, 291–2, 304n8 academic performance indicators (API) 288 Career Advancement Scheme 287–8 exercises powers both on public and private universities 288 limitations of role 271–2, 284 new initiatives taken by 287 non-performance of 286 powers granted to 283–4 regulation of PhD degree award 288 Rudolphs’ viewpoint on 272–3 University of Delhi 273, 288, 294–5n13 urban bias 322 Maoists 348 mobilization 194 urbanization 98, 132 vernacular middle classes 255–6 violence 15, 38, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 107, 158n18, 239, 246, 249, 250, 257, 259, 260, 263, 311, 312, 315n19, sexual 282

vote bank politics 330 mobilizers 334 war, concept of 67, 109–13 Weber, Max xxxn6, 4, 19, 59, 212 approach to social complexity 20 associated democracy with opportunities 24 bases for class distinctions 21 on charisma, on 242–3, 349 on classes, on 46n1 on individual motivation 26 legitimate authority, forms of 24 political development for 24 on political leaders 23 roots of Rudolphs’ mode of political inquiry 20–7, 42 social action 20, 21 on socialism 24 on social science 26 understanding, types of 26 Verstehen, concept of 20, 25–6 working-class consciousness 231n16 working-class politics in India 216–18 YouTube 119n8, 255, 337

Editors and Contributors

Editors John Echeverri-Gent is associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States and co-editor of Economic Reform in Three Giants: U.S. Foreign Policy and the USSR, China, and India. His many articles in comparative public policy and the political economy of development have appeared in Perspectives on Politics; PS: Political Science and Politics; World Development; Policy Studies Journal; Asian Survey; Contemporary South Asia; and India Review. He is the winner of the Theodore J. Lowi Award presented by the Policy Studies Organization for the best article in the Policy Studies Journal. His current research project is on ‘The Political Economy of India’s Financial Sector Reform’. Echeverri-Gent’s research has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Fulbright Hays, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He is a member of the editorial board of Political Science Quarterly. He has served as consultant to the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He was chair of the American Political Science Task Force on Difference and Inequality in Developing Societies and treasurer of the American Institute of Indian Studies. He received his PhD and MA in political science from the University of Chicago.

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Kamal Sadiq (PhD, University of Chicago) is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the processes of political inclusion and legal membership of immigrants, refugees, and the urban poor in developing countries, specifically in South Asia (India, Bangladesh) and South-East Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia). His book Paper Citizens: How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries (2009, repr. 2010) shows how fake, but seemingly real, documents provide a path to citizenship status and rights in weak-capacity states with consequences for state sovereignty and security. His articles on illegal immigration, regional and national identity, and post-colonial citizenship have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Asian Perspectives, the Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, and select edited books. His interventions in International Relations theory and methods have appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and PS: Political Science & Politics respectively. Sadiq’s research has been funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. He served as chair of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies (ENMISA) section of the International Studies Association (2013–15) and as co-president of the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2015–17). He serves on the editorial board of the journal Citizenship Studies.

Contributors Rina Agarwala is associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Agarwala is author of Informal Labor, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent in India (2013) and co-editor (with Ron Herring) of Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from South Asia (2008). She has published articles on informal labour, transnational movements, migration, legal justice, and gender. Currently she is working on a book manuscript on migration and development, as well as a cross-country comparative project on informal workers’ movements in seven countries. Agarwala holds a BA in economics and government from Cornell University, an MPP in political and economic development from the

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Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in demography and sociology from Princeton University. Kalaiyarasan Arumugam is a faculty member at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. He did his PhD in development economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was previously a faculty member at the National Institute of Labour Economics Research and Development, Planning Commission, Government of India. He works on caste, labour, industrialization, and regional political economy in India. Amrita Basu is the Domenic J. Paino Professor of political science and sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies, Amherst College, USA. Her scholarship explores women’s activism, feminist movements, and religious nationalism in South Asia. Her most recent book, Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India (2015), shines a spotlight on when and why Hindu nationalists engage in violence against religious minorities. She is the author of Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women’s Activism in India (1992) and the editor or co-editor of Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms (2010, 2016), Beyond Exceptionalism: Violence, Religion, and Democracy in India (2006), Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World (2002), Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (1998), Community Conflicts and the State in India (1997), The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective (1998), and Women, Gender and Religious Nationalism in India (forthcoming). Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Peace Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS). She has participated on advisory committees of the American Political Science Association (executive council and strategic planning committee), AIIS (executive committee, vice president,) United Nations Development Program, South Asia Council of the Asian Studies Association, the Ford Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies/SSRC South Asia Committee, and on fellowship selection committees of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, NEH, McArthur Foundation,

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Infosys, ACLS/SSRC, AIIS, and the Ford Foundation. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Political Science Review, International Political Science Review, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and Critical Asian Studies, and was the South Asia editor for The Journal of Asian Studies. Leela Fernandes is the Glenda Dickerson Collegiate Professor of women’s studies and professor of political science at the University of Michigan. She is the author of India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform; Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, Power; Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills; and Transforming Feminist Practice. She is currently writing a new book titled India’s Liberalizing State: Urbanization, Inequality, and the Politics of Water. She has also published numerous essays and articles on questions of inequality, politics, and feminist theory and is the editor of Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State and Handbook on Gender in South Asia. Ronald Herring is Professor Emeritus of government studies and Visiting International Professor of global development at Cornell University, USA. He served as chair of the Department of Government, director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the John S. Knight Professor of international relations, among other positions at Cornell. He was previously professor of political science at Northwestern University. His interests have been in South Asia, especially class politics, ethnic conflict, and agricultural development. His recent publications and referee work have focused on genome editing, gene drives, and new frontiers of plant technology. His most exciting, challenging, and fulfilling job at Cornell was creating and teaching with a team of natural scientists a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the EdX/CornellX platform, ‘The Science and Politics of the GMO’, enrolling thousands of students from over 144 countries (2016 Fall, 2017 Spring). Francis W. ‘Frank’ Hoeber is a historian and writer working in Philadelphia. His book Against Time: Letters from Nazi Germany, 1938–1939 (2015) documents the flight of his parents, Johannes and Elfriede Hoeber, from Nazi Germany with their 9-year-old daughter

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Susanne. Frank’s German translation of this book by German Resistance Memorial Foundation (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand) and Lukas Verlag in Berlin is forthcoming. Following the death of Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph at the end of 2015, Frank carried out their request to complete and edit their last book, Romanticism’s Child: An Intellectual History of James Tod’s Influence on Indian History and Historiography (2016). Previously, Frank spent nearly 45 years in public service. He was an executive at the headquarters of the New Jersey Judiciary in Trenton and published numerous articles on court management. Previously, he managed all investigations in the Philadelphia office of the National Labor Relations Board. He was a contributor to Cox, Bok, and Gorman’s Labor Law: Cases and Materials (1986). Frank is a graduate of Columbia University and has an MA in history from Temple University. Christophe Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at Le Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI), Sciences Po/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and professor of Indian politics and sociology at King’s India Institute (London). Among his publications are The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to 1990s (1999), India’s Silent Revolution (2003), and The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience (2015). Niraja Gopal Jayal is professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (1999). She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (2010) and is the editor/co-editor of Democracy in India (2001) and Local Governance in India: Decentralisation and Beyond (2005) among others. She is currently working on a book on the decline of the public university in India. She has held visiting appointments at, among others, King’s College, London; the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris; Princeton University, New Jersey; and the University of Melbourne. In 2009 she delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial

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Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford. She was vice president of the American Political Science Association in 2011–12. Kristen Renwick Monroe is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science, founder/director of the UCI Ethics Center, past president of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), former vice president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and former president of the National Women’s Caucus for Political Science. Monroe is the author/editor of over 100 articles and 18 books, including four award-winning books on altruism, moral choice, and how people keep their humanity during war. A recipient of lifetime achievement awards for scholarship and service from UCI and both the APSA and the ISPP, Monroe’s latest books are On Ethics and Economics (2016, with Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow) and The Evils of Polygyny (2018, with Rose McDermott). Her current research includes: When Conscience Calls: Moral Courage in an Age of Confusion and Despair; Chloe and Nicole and the Elephant in the Parlor: Essays on Ethics; and Empowering Women: Gender Equality in Academia. Previously a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, winner of the 2018 Berlin Prize, and the Dirk Irpin Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Monroe serves as book review editor for Political Psychology and mentors the Graber scholars and the Tobis Fellows at the UCI Ethics Center. She has taught at New York University, Princeton University, University of British Columbia, SUNY Stony Brook, and Harvard University, USA. Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and professor of international relations and political science at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University (BU), and founding director of BU’s Center for the Study of Europe. Professor Schmidt has published widely on the European political economy, institutions and democracy, as well as on neo-institutional theory (discursive institutionalism), with 12 books and over 200 chapters in books and articles in journals. Some of her books include The Futures of European Capitalism (2002), Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities (2006; named in 2015 by the European Parliament as one of the ‘100 Books on Europe to Remember’), Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (co-edited with M. Thatcher, 2013), and the forthcoming

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Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone. Steven I. Wilkinson is the Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian studies and professor of political science and international affairs at Yale University, Connecticut, where he is also chair of the Department of Political Science. He works on the causes of ethnic violence. His book Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (2004) examines the political roots of communal conflict in South Asia. He is also interested in corruption in politics, and co-edited the book Patrons, Clients or Politics: Patterns of Political Accountability and Competition (2007) with Herbert Kitschelt. His most recent book is Army and Nation (2015) which examines India’s success in managing the imbalanced colonial army it inherited in 1947. He is currently working with Saumitra Jha (Stanford Graduate School of Business) on the book War and Political Change, the first part of which, on the role of veterans in the Partition of India, was published in article form in the American Political Science Review. The next part of this project looks at the role of returned veterans from the American War of Independence in the French Revolution.