Politics and the State in India [1 ed.] 9788132118534

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Readings in Indian Government and Politics Series Editors :            Zoya Hasan Kuldeep Mathur Ghanshyam Shah

Other volumes in the same series : Volume 1 : Development Policy and Administration edited by Kuldeep Mathur Volume 2 : Decentraliztion and Local Politics edited by S.N. Jha and P.C. Mathur

Politics and the State in India Readings in Indian Government and Politics–3

Edited by Zoya Hasan

Copyright © Zoya Hasan, 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2002 by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver's Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Politics and the state in India/edited by Zoya Hasan           p.cm.—(Readings in Indian government and politics; 3) Includes bibilographia references and index.        1. India—Politics and government—1947–I. Hasan Zoya. II. Series JQ231.P64                  320.954—dc21             2000        00–055384 ePub ISBN: 978-81-321-1853-4 The SAGE Team: Gayeti Singh, Shreya Chakraborti, Nand Kumar Jha and Rajender Kaur

Contents Preface by the Series Editors Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: The Political Career of the State in Independent India       Zoya Hasan PART I 2. The Modern State in India      Sudipta Kaviraj 3. The Political Culture of the Indian State      Ashis Nandy 4. The Social Character of the Indian State      Achin Vanaik PART II 5. Development Planning and the Indian State      Partha Chatterjee 6. The State in India's Economic Development      Prabhat Patnaik 7. The Political Economy of Reform in India      Pranab Bardhan PART III 8. The Decline of the Moderate State      Rajni Kothari 9. Centralization and Powerlessness: India's Democracy in a Comparative Perspective      Atul Kohli PART IV 10. Decline of a Social Order         Francine R. Frankel 11. Changing Terms of Elite Discourse: The Case of Reservation for ‘Other Backward Classes’

        D.L. Sheth 12. Religion and Politics in a Secular State: Law, Community and Gender         Zoya Hasan PART V 13. ‘I am the Government Labour Officer…’: State Protection for the Rural Proletariat of South Gujarat         Jan Breman 14. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State         Akhil Gupta About the Editor and Contributors Index

Readings in Indian Government and Politics Preface by the Series Editors This series focuses on significant themes in contemporary Indian government and politics. Each volume explores a wide range of problems and issues in specific areas of Indian politics and locates them within wider debates on politics, society, economy and culture. The series focuses on the interface of social forces, political institutions and processes in an attempt to understand the changing grammar of Indian politics. A variety of approaches have been deployed by social scientists in general and political scientists in particular to understand the relationships between state and society, democracy and development, state and classes controlling its power, formation of public policy and its implementation, and between issues of cultural recognition and distribution, as also between different segments and regions, religion, caste, languages and culture. The analysis of some of these themes and issues from different perspectives and approaches constitutes the principal endeavour of this series. The review of issues of theoretical and substantive importance both within institutional structures and outside them can illuminate the complex interplay of sociopolitical forces and political processes and the dynamics of social formation and political transformation in modern India. The aim is to strike a balance between empirical observation and theoretical analysis of political processes. Each volume in the series consists of a detailed introduction and a selection of essays essential for the understanding of the theme. Using this pattern, each volume will critically appraise the state of research in the theme, re-examine old problems and open up new issues for enquiry. The series will be of interest to anyone concerned with the study of Indian government and politics. However, it will be of special interest to students of political science, sociology and contemporary history and to policy makers, bureaucrats, journalists and social activists. Zoya Hasan Ghanshyam Shah Kuldeep Mathur

Acknowledgements The papers, with their complete citations, included in this volume, are mentioned below: Kaviraj, Sudipta

19 97

Nandy, Ashis

19 89

Vanaik, Achin Chatterj ee, Partha

19 90 19 94

Patnaik, Prabhat Bardhan , Pranab

19 95 19 84

Kothari, Rajni

19 83

Kohli, Atul

19 94

‘The Modern State in India’, in Martin Doornbos and Sudipta Kaviraj (eds), Dynamics of State Formation: India and Europe Compared , New Delhi: Sage Publications. ‘The Political Culture of the Indian State’, reprinted by permission of Daedalus , Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, from the issue entitled Another India , Fall 1989, Vol. 118, No. 4. ‘The Social Character of the Indian State’, in Achin Vanaik, The Painful Transition , London: Verso Press. ‘Development Planning and the Indian State’, in T.J. Byres (ed.), State and Development Planning in India , New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, New Delhi. ‘Nation-State in the Era of Globalisation’, Economic and Political Weekly , 19 August, Vol. 30, No. 33. ‘Dominant Proprietary Classes’, in Pranab Bardhan, Political Economy of Development , New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, New Delhi. ‘Crisis of the Moderate State and Decline of Democracy’, in Peter Lyon and James Manor (eds.), Transfer and Transformation: Political Institutions in the New Commonwealth: Essays in Honour of W.H. Morris-Jones , Leicester: Leicester University Press. Revised version published as ‘Decline of the Moderate State’, in State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance , Delhi: Ajanta, 1988. ‘Centralization and Powerlessness: India's Democracy in a Comparative Perspective’, in J. Migdal, A. Kohli and V. Shue (eds), State Power and Social Forces , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frankel, Francine R. Sheth, D.L.

19 89

Hasan, Zoya

19 97

Breman, Jan

19 85

Gupta, Akhil

19 95

19 96

‘Decline of a Social Order’, in Francine R. Frankel, Dominance and State Power in India , Vol. II, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ‘Changing Terms of Elite Discourse: The Case of Reservation for “Other Backward Classes”, in T.V. Sathyamurthy (ed.), Region, Religion, Caste, Gender and Culture in Contemporary India , Vol. 3, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Completely modified version of ‘Gender Politics, Legal Reform, and the Muslim Community in India’, in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds), Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia , New York: Routledge. “I am the Government Labour Officer…”: State Protection for the Rural Proletariat of South Gujarat', Economic and Political Weekly , 15 June, Vol. 20, No. 24. ‘Blurred Boundaries: Corruption and the Local State’, American Ethnologist , June.

1 Introduction: The Political Career of the State in Independent India ZOYA HASAN An understanding of the state enjoys a pre-eminent status in the study of politics. It must form a general background to the perception of what is possible in development and what are its historical conditions and political limits. The state is a central player in the modern drama of development, and nowhere is it more important than in the development of the Third World. Its successes, its failures and its distortions, cannot be fully appreciated without a proper understanding of the trajectories of state formation. To understand how states are formed and how they have come to be what they are, we must think historically about them, and look beyond the formal structures to their social and political specificities. This introduction explores the social and political dynamics of state and state formation in contemporary India. It does not present new material on the character or organization of the state. It, rather, reinterprets some of the principal issues in Indian politics so as to contextualize the major developments affecting the growth and formation of the state. Central to the discussion in the 1970s and 1980s were the tensions between democratic aspirations in civil society and the centralizing structures of state power. The principal clash, at this point, appears to be between the logic of modernity and the broader issues of identity, and the high politics of the state. The new interest in identity and culture parallels shifts in the sphere of economy where there is much less emphasis on the universalistic legacy of economic development and redistribution, and much more on selective redistribution based on claims of categories of groups to particular goods and services. The uncertainty of these trends and tendencies denotes a new

phase of the contemporary state, as compared to the overall stability of the first few decades after Independence.

Approaches to the Study of the State Several serious attempts have been made to understand the post-colonial state, although there is no necessary agreement on what constitutes the nature of the state. Broadly speaking, the two dominant interpretations are: liberal and Marxist. The liberal-modernist perspective focuses on institutions and processes as the key to understanding the state and political power in India. Marxist theories regard political economy as the decisive factor and the principle of class analysis as the determining element in unpacking the state. Derived from the liberal modernization theory, early descriptions of the state concentrated on the functioning of political institutions and democratic processes. The establishment of a stable democracy went against conventional laws of political history that were sceptical about the possibilities of the success of the democratic experiment in India. Rajni Kothari attributed its success to the existence of pluralist tolerance and a culture of consensus (Kothari 1970). This argument offered an alternate base for democratic superstructures and for an Indian model of democracy. The combination of democratic ideology, economic development and distributive justice provided a unique opportunity of transforming a traditionally apolitical society in which the state became the central instrument, and politics the principal agent of transformation. Emphasis on the primacy of the political process distinguished the specificity of democratic experiment in terms different from the prevailing Western frameworks. The most influential account of the political system on these lines was written by Rajni Kothari. Similarly, W.H. Morris-Jones stressed the capability of political institutions, specially one-party dominance, and, more generally, representative institutions in bringing about social and economic change (Morris-Jones 1971). But everyone was not equally impressed with the state's agenda or its achievements. Gunnar Myrdal, for instance, described it as a ‘soft state’ lacking the capacity to act against the vested interests (Myrdal 1968). The term ‘soft state’ signified the limits of public power: the state's inability to enforce public policies to eradicate poverty or to enforce its own laws.

Transformations in society effected changes in the conception of the state. The liberal-institutional approach, with its focus on the formal and functional aspects in the study of the state, was unable to explain the significant changes in India since the late 1960s. Two perspectives— society-centric and state-centric—emerged in political science to explain these changes. The central feature of the society-centric approach was its focus on social change, hence, it highlighted the variety and range of mechanisms of social change—zamindari abolition, Garibi Hatao (Abolish Poverty), Mandalization, assertion of lower orders—in promoting or hampering the functioning of the state (Hasan et al. 1988; Frankel and Rao 1989; Sathyamurthy 1994). There was, however, considerable dissatisfaction with society-centred approaches. This gave rise in the 1980s to a new state-oriented literature which foregrounded the autonomy of the state, arguing that society-centred theories, whether of the modernization or dependency variety, were simply deficient because they reduced politics to societal variables. For Atul Kohli, ‘the understanding of how and why the state intervenes is inadequate as long as it remains tied primarily to the conditions of the society and economy’ (Kohli 1987: 60). For statists, conflict was secondary; unity of the state and its autonomy from societal and class interests was primary. According to this analysis, state is not an agent of classes or groups, rather it functions independently of and in the interests of all groups and classes. Invoking the authority of Weber, the state is seen in quintessential organizational terms: an actual arrangement with distinctive interests and goals that influences the politics of society as a whole. Several studies have shown the limitations of the statist approach in the Indian context, where it is considerably constrained by a fragmented, heterogeneous society. The basic question is what the ways are in which state capacity might be constrained by social and cultural specificities (Jayal 1999). This question has been addressed in several different ways. Economic evaluation has given priority to economic growth and an assessment of the design and strategy for its implementation. The main critique of the Indian state has come from neoclassical economists who are concerned with the role of the state in economic growth. J. Bhagwati and T.N. Srinivasan have pointed out as to how the strategy of combining planning and import substitution resulted in a high-cost economy fraught with corruption, inefficiency and distortions (Bhagwati and Srinivasan

1975). The logic of planning, regional diversification and controls on industrial capacity spawned a series of controls that bureaucratic and political actors could use to their advantage, engendering rent-seeking. The second type of critique focuses on the bureaucracy and faulty implementation of policies blamed” on the rent-seeking proclivities of the bureaucracy. Further, that the professionals in the public sector have developed into a dominant proprietary class (Bardhan 1984). Political scientists are not so much concerned with economic growth, but with the nature of the political system and democracy. One approach looks at the historical contradiction between the transformative goals of development planning and the conservative forces of institutional democratic politics. This is Francine Frankel's approach. Making a distinction between political and social issues, she emphasized the difficulties confronting an accommodationist strategy of class conciliation in politics and a commitment to transformative goals in society within a democratic framework (Frankel 1978). Subscribing to a neo-Marxist view, Bardhan contends that the state is an autonomous actor, which in certain historical cases such as India's is an important player in shaping and moulding class power, rather than vice versa (Bardhan 1984: 55–57). An intermediate position is taken by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, who analyse the state in terms of the conflict between a ‘demand polity’ in which societal demands expressed as electoral pressure dominate over the state, and a ‘command polity’ where state hegemony dominates over society (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). The argument rests on the state's role as the ‘third actor’, along with capital and labour, and by far the most powerful one, in relation to both ‘organized private capital’ and ‘organized labour’. The inability of the state to achieve its declared agenda is attributed by Kohli to the logic of democracy, which, by enhancing political participation, also leads to a multiplication of demands on the state, as the controller of scarce resources (Kohli 1990). Among many underlying causes, one extremely influential factor is the weakness of political institutions, specially the erosion of political institutions and the decline of political parties that have made India's governability problems exceedingly complex. For Marxists, the complexity of class formation, class configuration and class action are central elements for an understanding of the constraints on the state and capitalist transformation. Though their perceptions differ, the

specificities of its relationship to imperialism occupy centre stage in this debate (Kurian 1975; Wilson 1994). Analysis of the state is understood both in terms of the long-term structural compulsions of Indian politics which are determined by capitalism and the inclusion of the economy in the international capitalist system and its division of labour, and also the coalition arrangements and the changing balance in the class coalitions dominating the state (Kaviraj 1997). Two points are worth noting. One, bourgeois dominance of the state is not reflected in bourgeois dominance of society. Second, capitalist control is exercised through a class coalition, indeed, a coalitional strategy is the condition of dominance. In class terms, the ruling coalition contained three elements: monopoly bourgeoisie, landed elite and bureaucratic managerial elite (Prabhat Patnaik 1972). The imposition of Emergency in 1975 produced a fresh controversy on the state, this time on the role of repressive powers in sustaining the state. After the Emergency, the discussion shifted to the relative autonomy of the state, particularly the inability of the bourgeoisie in instituting its hegemony over civil society (Wilson 1994). As a counter to these views that often ignore the cultural and discursive terrain of Indian politics, scholars subscribing to a ‘subaltern’ approach subjected bourgeois politics and the nation state to a sustained cultural critique. They argued that Indian democracy was the outcome, not of a national popular revolution, but a passive one carried out by the Gandhi-led Congress that enabled the bourgeoisie to establish its hegemony over the subaltern groups, but without ever frontally confronting them. Dealing with the state as an essentially contested concept, the ‘subaltern’ scholars spotlighted their attentions outside the circles of elite politics, and emphasized the potential of the ‘subaltern classes’ (artisans, poor peasants, landless labourers), and their ideologies of resistance in reshaping the state (Chatterjee 1986, 1993, 1998). While the social character of the state has been the subject of a lively and critical debate, very few subaltern or Marxist writers have examined the actual operations of the state. Marxist accounts are generally strong in describing the central structures of dominance, state power and its relations with organized forces in society. As a result, differences have centred over the precise class mix of the state and its autonomy from or dependence upon various class forces. But these frameworks are not as effective in analysing the regional-and local-level institutions and microlevel practices.

They tend to underestimate the specifics of the institutional framework of the state, the innumerable chains in the structure of power, particularly the relationship of the state with local institutions, and the ways in which contradictions between the dominant classes and changes in class formation are ‘inscribed in the institutional materiality of the state’ at different levels (Poulantzas 1978: 14). To understand these processes, it is important to unravel the specific ways in which the state rules, as that may have a significant effect on social institutions, relations and practices.

Historicity of State Structures and State Formation The foundational principles of the nation state were enshrined in the Constitution adopted in 1950. Key institutions of the modern state—liberal democracy, universal adult suffrage, democratic decision making and modern citizenship—were put in place in the formative years between 1947 and 1950 (Austin 2000). The historical circumstances of Partition and the extreme political instability in the wake of the country's vivisection—the conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir, the integration of several rebellious states like Hyderabad into the Indian union, the Communist insurgency in Telangana—led the state to rely heavily on the colonial legacy and the military and bureaucratic structures inherited from the Raj, in order to establish political authority over its diverse population and vast territory. The state laid strong emphasis on law and order, command and control, and at the same time, the principal objective was to change this colonial legacy through social transformation. Two major objectives dominated the state: construction of a unified nation, and social transformation. Presiding over the transition from colonialism, the most important priority was to weld together a nation state from a culturally and linguistically heterogeneous society and economically disparate regions. In the pursuit of this goal, the political leadership followed the ideology of composite nationalism to integrate all strands of the people. The linguistic reorganization of states in 1956 proved to be a master stroke in shaping the future institutional arrangement. This decision contributed significantly to the expansion and consolidation of federal democracy (Banerjee 1992). Consistent with the second objective of social transformation, the ruling elite were committed to building a developmental state, to stimulate growth

in the economy (Chakravarty 1987). Attention was focused on heavy industry, producer goods and social overheads, with a relative de-emphasis on agriculture, specially evident in the Second Five-Year Plan. The basic needs of the population were incorporated in the formula of ‘growth with equity’. But this strategy was circumscribed by historical specificities of Indian society. An important limitation pertains to the dependence of the state on the process of capital accumulation, and its protection of the longterm interests of capital. The central government was restricted by the constitutional limitations on the power of the central government in the rural sector, while state governments, which were assigned the .primary responsibility over land reforms and agricultural policies, were thoroughly dominated by the landed elite, who put limits on the prospects of sweeping changes of the social order by actions from above (Frankel 1978: 81). This precluded any egalitarian redistribution of assets. In fact, capital regularly used the state to augment its share in the output through a process of what is described as ‘primary accumulation of capital’ (Prabhat Patnaik 1998). Given the prevailing inequalities in income distribution and access to political power, the social base for growth continued to be a relatively narrow one, and the gains from this limited growth were appropriated disproportionately by a relatively small segment of the population. State intervention was not successful in promoting rapid growth, and much less in providing the vast majority with a decent standard of living. Though important achievements can be listed in areas, notably the development of an industrial base, increasing per capita availability of foodgrains, the elimination of mass famines, higher education and the creation of a large scientific community, the Nehruvian vision expressed in his widely celebrated speech on India's ‘Tryst with Destiny’, remained largely unfulfilled. At the ideological level, the odds against state intervention appeared insurmountable, at least partly because most of Nehru's colleagues did not share his reformist and socialist vision. Hence, both Nehru and Indira Gandhi relied mainly on the civil service as the principal engine of social transformation (Chakravarty 1987: 40–42). Both counted on the instrumentality of the state, and equated the idea of public good with the institutional control of the state. Above all, they disregarded the possibility that state institutions could be effectively privatized, and become vehicles of personal and sectional interests.

The enduring legacy of the Nehruvian state was not its economic achievements, but in the establishment of a viable structure of a relatively autonomous and democratic nation state at the core of society, committed to the idea of building a reformist, politically independent, capitalist society. During this period, the state stabilized, assumed responsibility to direct economic development, established a constitutional regime, accumulated for itself a wide array of powers and responsibilities, ranging from the abolition of untouchability, establishment of places of higher education and culture, to building dams and nuclear reactors (Khilnani 1997: 38). The combined effect of developmentalism and democratic mobilization was a rapid penetration of the state into domains of society hitherto untouched by the state. Nevertheless, we should not overrate the state's ability to restructure social and economic formations. Its major inadequacy, severely affecting its subsequent performance, was the failure to institutionalize ideological preferences, resulting in a system that led to the growing marginalization of millions, increasing inequity and discontent. What prevented this disaffection from being translated into mass alienation was the mass structure of the Congress party mediating between state and society.

Divergences in State and Society The project of state building ran into rough weather in the post-Nehru period. This was partly because the axis of connection between state and society—the ‘Congress system’—began running into serious difficulties (Kothari 1988, 1995). This system consisted of a differentiated structure of the party organization from the central to the provincial and district levels, each level working in consonance with the corresponding level of government. The interface helped the Congress to accommodate different class and group interests with the ruling formation. But this system began crumbling as Congress electoral fortunes deteriorated after 1967. The problems facing the Congress were partly symptomatic of wider changes in society, and partly the result of its own actions. Two major tensions emerged in the politics of the state. The first was due to centralization and the resultant tensions in the relationship between the centre and the states. The concentration of power clogged the federal structure of politics. Second, the rise of the rich peasantry or surplus producers, promoted by the

Green Revolution, set in motion major economic and political changes (Utsa Patnaik 1986). This class captured the benefits of land reforms, the community development programmes, and the Panchayati Raj system and the networks of cooperatives. Regardless of these benefits, they were disappointed by what the Congress was willing to offer, and were more than willing to desert it for a coalition of opposition parties. This marked a watershed in the process of economic and political development of the state. From the early 1970s, a marked divergence emerged between the state and society, as the Congress government began facing considerable discontent in the societal sphere. Unlike the past, the Congress was not seen any more as a force of radical change, but as a party endorsing social inequality. Pressing the government and the ruling party for greater participation, resources, as well as specific policy changes and administrative actions, were a large number of social and political groups and organizations. The Congress party's troubles were aggravated by rising prices, food shortages, industrial stagnation and massive unemployment that provoked widespread protests. Evidence of this disquiet were peasant movements against oppression by landlords, the railway strike in 1974, and growing anxiety and restlessness among the middle classes against price rise and corruption in government. Agitations and protests were the order of the day, and the most conspicuous were the opposition movements in Gujarat and Bihar and the Naxalbari uprising in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Bihar (Shah 1977, 1990). All these movements were checked through the deployment of the coercive apparatus of the state. Successive droughts led to large-scale import of food from the United States under PL 480, even as the proportion of the poor below the poverty line increased substantially (Frankel 1978). The economic crisis came to a head with the devaluation of the rupee in 1966 and the persistent industrial stagnation. The crisis in the economy and the setbacks suffered by the Congress party led to a new emphasis on agriculture. The agricultural strategy witnessed a decisive shift from the institutional reorganization of agriculture to boosting agricultural production through price incentives and technical change that benefited rural capitalist farmers (Varshney 1995). This agrarian model was counterbalanced in the early 1970s by changes in public policy focused on redistribution and poverty alleviation as the

principal rationale of state intervention. By a series of measures which included nationalization of banks, abolition of privy purses and nationalization of insurance, Indira Gandhi attempted to strengthen the popular base of the state. Attention centred on introducing policies targeted at specific groups, such as Scheduled Castes or Tribes, or the rural poor, or workers. The design of these programmes was problematic, and large parts of the funds were appropriated by local vested interests, yet, it was the first acknowledgement by the state that the poor mattered, if only rhetorically, in terms of electoral politics. Through this strategy, Indira Gandhi appealed directly to vast masses of the rural and urban poor whose condition had not improved much in three decades, but she attempted to do so while still presiding over a dominant coalition of urban bourgeois classes and rural landholding classes at the top. This created a paradox manifested in a political coalition of extremes that often ended up producing a variety of populism that relied heavily on statist ideology, rather than on actions and outcomes that could sustain it. The radical turn in the policies was induced by the escalating opposition against the Congress in several states. Through these policies, Indira Gandhi reinvented the Congress. The reinvention succeeded in reversing the party's decline, but in the process she reduced the Congress into an instrument for winning elections. The electoral majorities won by the Congress were seldom used to deliver on promises made by Indira Gandhi, thus weakening the government, and in the long run evaporating the party's massive support (Manor 1988). The capture of power, rather than its responsible exercise, became the sole obsession of Congress politicians. But in spite of all this, Indira Gandhi's strategy had the effect among the poor and oppressed groups of creating an appreciation of the significance of elections, democratic participation, and, above all, that access to power was vital for their well being. With the result that the state had to reckon with popular pressures and create avenues for the economic advancement of new groups.

Crisis of the State Until 1989, the Congress party continued to wield power at the centre, except for the brief interregnum of Janata Party rule from 1977 to 1979, but its political authority had been greatly diminished in the provincial arena.

Its unchallenged political dominance at the centre had obscured tensions and conflicts between different segments of society and the state. From the mid-1970s, the state had entered a phase of what is generally described as a form of structural crisis. The most obvious manifestations of this were the imposition of Emergency in 1975–77, and the difficulties faced by the secular polity since the mid-1980s (Zins 1988). At the level of the institutional framework, Indira Gandhi changed the routine by shattering the boundaries between the centre and states. She embarked upon a process of centralization of government functions under a politicized bureaucracy (Kochanek 1976). Emergency accelerated the concentration of power within the offices in New Delhi. The principal effect of these policies was felt by the Congress party itself, but its centrality in the political arena ensured that its actions transformed the relationship of the centre with the states by decreasing their relevance and that of districts as critical arenas of political competition and mobilization independent of the centre, and this ultimately altered the character of the state. It immersed the party, the government, and eventually the state itself, into the authoritarian system, effecting an extension of the sphere of crisis, and in actual fact, accelerating the process of decline of the Congress under way since the late 1960s (Kaviraj 1997). As a result, the space that existed in the Nehru era for the independent exercise of power by Congress leaders at the state and district levels diminished. This strategy proved to be counterproductive in managing tensions and cleavages: it made the Congress more vulnerable by undermining the regional leadership of the party, and undercut the roots of autonomy necessary for a centrist party operating in a heterogeneous society. Within twenty years of Nehru's death, the central conflicts of Indian politics changed significantly. The multiple crises confronting the political system included corruption, centralization, criminalization and pauperization, social disempowerment of the marginalized, decline of secularism and the rise of national chauvinism based on religion, erosion in the political system revealed in a growing divide between the included and excluded, and finally the coercive response of the state to the assertion of civil and political rights (Kothari 1988). The major cause of the crisis was a change in the nature of the state from being an instrument of liberation of the masses to a source of their oppression signalled in the erosion of the institutions of the state under the regimes of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv

Gandhi. The important issue was the incapacity of institutions to cope with the multiple pressures of democracy (Manor 1988). In the economic sphere, increasing political competition exercised a strong influence on public policies. It gave rise to a competitive politics of populism as different parties wooed the voters with new promises. There was a flurry of subsidies, loan waivers and loan melas (fairs). Beyond this, there was a rapid increase in public consumption in sharp contrast to the expansion in public expenditure in the decade after Independence. Yet, economic development did not provide adequate social opportunities for people. Poverty alleviation programmes such as the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme launched in 1980 were meant to sustain minimum levels of consumption (Kohli 1987). But the provision of basic education, health care and social security was simply inadequate. Economic development did not conform to expectations and promises, and the benefits of economic growth accrued to the rich while the poor were all but bypassed despite the popular mandates won by the Congress through their support. Politics was overshadowed by friction around religious, caste and regional identities as the ideology of nationalism ebbed. This was partly the consequence of the decline of the Congress and partly the regionalization of politics that surfaced as a result of it. Electoral instability played an important part in political change. In an ironic reversal of roles, Indira Gandhi abandoned the Garibi Hatao slogan, and from the early 1980s embraced a majoritarian strategy to regain her party's dwindling support (Hasan 1998). The most striking impact of these policies was witnessed in Punjab (Brass 1988; Jeffrey 1986). Indira Gandhi's actions fomented antiminority fears in Punjab and Kashmir and ignored Sikh pleas that the constitutional definition of them as Hindus should be corrected. At the same time, she tried to gain control of Punjab by encouraging extremist elements in the Akali Dal which became increasingly outspoken, calling for a sovereign state of Khalistan. The Punjab crisis was followed by a far more serious and militant confrontation threatening national unity in Kashmir (Ganguly 1997). The rising resentment at several decades of unevenly directed economic development and excessive concentration of powers by the central state encouraged regions such as Punjab, Kashmir and Assam to confront and contest the authority of the state and talk the language of secessionism to get a hearing in the representative structures of the state.

This brought identity conflicts to the heart of the state (Basu and Subrahmanyam 1996). In many ways, the identity politics which has dominated the 1980s and 1990s—decades replete with secessionist movements, caste assertions, Hindu nationalism and minority discontent—draws upon cultural identities, but is often inspired by parties and electoral contests. This is apparent from the short-term strategies formulated by Congress leaders to win the socalled Hindu vote, and, at the same time, regain favour with Muslims and Scheduled Castes who had begun to desert the Congress. Thus, in 1986, the Rajiv Gandhi government slammed through a bill declaring that Muslim women would not have access to civil law in matters of marriage and divorce (Hasan 1994). These policies discredited secularism and the authenticity of secular nationalism. Not surprisingly, the politics of these years witnessed increasing pressures from Hindu nationalism on the political structures of the state (Embree 1992). The increased reliance on communitarian symbols helped to draw religious categories into the political arena (van der Veer 1994). The most dramatic event in this competitive process was the central government's decision to allow Hindu worship inside the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. This accelerated the mass mobilization organized by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) as part of the effort to change the political discourse and control the state in the name of Hindutva. Dedicated to a redefinition of nationalism, the BJP filled the political vacuum created by the decline of the Congress by providing a Hindu nationalist alternative to the Congress. Its climb to national power was facilitated by the Ramjanmabhoomi (birthplace of Lord Ram) campaign and was linked with its opposition to the minority United Front government's decision in 1990 to implement the recommendations of the 1980 Mandal Commission to reserve 27 per cent of all positions in the Indian Administrative Services and Indian Police Service for the Other Backward Classes. In this context, scholarly interest in Hindu nationalism has increased along with a debate about the character of the BJP and whether the ideology it represents is part of a wider struggle to reconstitute India in accordance with majoritarianism and the assertion of Hindu power over other communities (Hansen and Jaffrelot 1998).

The State in Transition The most striking change has taken place in the sphere of economic policy, as India moved from state-led capitalism to a market-driven one. The state's relationship to the economy was decisively reshaped from the early 1990s by the neoliberal agenda adopted in response to a combination of internal and external pressures, particularly the external debt crisis in 1991 (Bhaduri and Nayyar 1996). The dramatic change is attributable in part to the domestic crisis and in part to broader international developments: the collapse of socialist economy had removed the only real alternative to the capitalist market. In the event, external pressures saw a noticeable extension of the neoliberal agenda of Western financial institutions into the policy formation and administration of the state. Both direct and indirect pressure were applied on the government to improve its political and economic governance. The central approach underlying these changes involved a greater reliance on market mechanisms, and this translates into a range of policies including deregulation and reduction of government controls, a disproportionate encouragement of imports, greater autonomy of private investment, lessening emphasis on the public sector, and opening the economy to international trade and convertibility of the rupee being the main features of the new economic policy (Joshi 1996). But liberalization measures have failed to stimulate an upswing in economic growth: in fact, according to available data, industrial growth after registering an increase between 1991 and 1996, slowed down between 1996 and 1998. Foreign direct investment has not risen significantly, and the much talked about foreign investment in infrastructure is yet to materialize. Delicencing of the regulatory regime has conferred greater autonomy to business, but it has not reduced corruption and rent seeking; if anything, deregulation of bureaucratic controls led to a liberalization of corruption (Currie 1996: 787–89). The initiation of liberalization policies has led to a re-examination of state intervention in competitive markets and development. The perception that state institutions were ineffective as providers of public goods and services was implicit in the acceptance of the market as an alternative delivery mechanism, where the role of the state was to facilitate and regulate the market (Bhaduri and Nayyar 1996). After deregulation and the initial production gains, poor infrastructure and weak purchasing power present

major obstacles to further economic expansion. Thus, economic liberalization is no panacea. Contrary to standard representations of the process, government and the bureaucracy are still critical in economic operations, but unlike the past, the state does not always act as a buffer between domestic and foreign capital in order to protect the former. Like the earlier dirigiste regime, liberalization primarily serves the interests of the upper and middle classes (Prabhat Patnaik 1998). The persisting inequality is reflected not so much in the narrowing of the category of the rich, which has possibly increased owing to the proliferation of the service sector and other white-collar jobs. The more important point is the effective disenfranchisement of important groups such as urban slum dwellers and rural poor which constitute the reserve army of labour for industrialization and the most fertile source for extra-legal activities and criminalization. The fact is that the Indian state has been ineffective in building the human base of development. The lack of basic education, gender rights, employment opportunities and health care for the bulk of the population has rendered India weak. Not only is the availability of goods and services deficient in aggregate terms, access to basic goods and services is very unequally distributed, and is determined not only by wealth and asset positions, but by a complex system of patronage and clientelism in rural and urban India. By the mid-1990s, the Indian political process had evolved considerably. At the centre of transition was the democratic process which had given a voice to the marginalized. Among the leading changes were the electoral upsurge of the disadvantaged groups, the political organization of lower castes and dalits in opposition to the upper castes, fragmentation of political parties, and the emergence of Hindutva as the most important challenge to the constitutional vision of the liberal democratic state. It is debatable whether such outcomes were all inherent in the diversity and heterogeneity of Indian society, or if pre-existing divisions were being deliberately manipulated by politicians to widen social conflicts in order to advance their own power and economic gain. One implication of the upsurge from below is the growth of new forms of representation. The early Congress system was an inclusive coalition of interests, but it provided representation in the legislature and in the government to only a small elite segment, and thus did not nullify the basic inequality between the status of voters (Hasan 1998). New parties and organizations have sought to correct the imbalance in representation, but

have done it in ways that have divided and fragmented the political space into castes and subcastes and communities and subcommunities. The most visible outcome of this social churning was an increase in lower-caste representation in government, specially at the local and regional levels. The scale of transfer of power, as indeed the social constellations giving rise to these shifts, has varied from region to region, but the unmistakable aftermath of Congress decline has been the displacement of upper castes from positions of power and the rise to power of backward and lower castes. This is nothing short of a quiet social revolution (Frankel and Rao 1989). The rise of the BJP to national power is the most significant change from the Nehru period. The three governments formed by the BJP since 1996 were/are coalition governments. Unlike the first two, the 1999 BJP-led government commands a parliamentary majority; still, the partners are ideologically dissimilar, the party finds itself cornered between its core Hindutva agenda and the moderation it must embrace, even if tactically, to govern effectively a modern and culturally diverse society (Kohli 1998). The National Agenda for Governance that lays out the common programme of the coalition eschews the controversial BJP goals that could be interpreted as hostile to the minorities. The BJP as a party is supported by the middle and upper classes. This social bloc has the potential of turning back the gains from the democratic upsurge of lower-caste groups. The Hindutva ideology favoured by the party as a unifying basis of national unity can conceivably recast the high politics of the state, calling into question the foundational ideas of the Indian republic, most notably, secularism and minority rights guaranteed in the Constitution of 1950. The BJP's commitment to India as a Hindu nation has enabled it to redefine Indian nationalism and to provide a substitute to the Congress’ ‘secular’ nationalist legacy. Its religious, backward-looking and upper-caste-dominated nationalism holds a special appeal for the elite and educated Indians, who feel their privileges are jeopardized by popular movements and lower-caste assertions, and thus believe that an alternative beginning must be made, ‘based not on borrowed ideas of secularism and socialism, but on an imagined past invoking the greatness of Hindu India’ (Kohli 1998: 10), and simultaneously favouring globalization and integration into an open international economy. Among the broad features of the emerging political design is a conspicuous shift from the paradigm of

development to security, a disinclination to tolerate dissent and disagreement, ultra-nationalism and an open licence to economic pragmatism.

Perspectives on the Indian State and Politics In the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely believed in India (as elsewhere) that the making of a successful nation state was basically a matter of legal and political construction and policy formulation. The political and economic history of India since 1947 shows that such a constructivist picture is misleading. Historical and economic structures which underlie political processes have had a ‘parametric limiting’ influence on what was possible in the political world (Doornboos and Kaviraj 1997: 12–14). Over the last two decades, the process of state formation has been a deeply contentious one. The state is still a vital agent, but it also constitutes a major terrain of political and social conflict. What are the main lines of conflict and change? It is possible to identify four broad facets. First, the distribution of the benefits of economic development is severely unequal. The real problem is that the process of economic development is going ahead without benefit to the majority, especially the worst off, who are not in a position to join it owing to the continuation of acute inequality and backwardness. Second, the crisis of legitimacy of the state both in terms of its respect and credibility in the eyes of the people, the breakdown of authority generally and more particularly of the centre in relation to the intermediate and local institutions, and the erosion in the autonomy of the state vis-á-vis civil society and external interests that have led to the decline in self-reliance and non-alignment (Kothari 1995: 29). Third, the ideological and organizational pillars of the Indian state, viz., secularism, welfarism and developmentalism, as well as the political and civil institutions, viz., the party system and civilian bureaucracies, have all been greatly weakened. Lastly, there is the pervasive politicization of the civil services and a massive rise in corruption of government officials and politicians: numerous bureaucrats, cabinet ministers and politicians have been indicted by the Supreme Court in the last few years for receiving illegal payments in return for political favours (Vishwanathan and Sethi 1998). Corruption and patronage have become pervasive dynamics of an economy and politics supported by a bureaucracy

suborned to the influence of selfish politicians (who have turned politics into a business), capitalists and entrepreneurs. There are three competing explanations for these changes. One argument suggests that the crisis of the state stems from the overbearing nature of the centralized state exacerbated by the derivative, and, therefore, alien provenance of the state, for the vast majority of the Indian people. Some have attributed the malaise of the nation state to the very condition of modernity and its imposition by colonialism on India (Chatterjee 1998). An important manifestation of this, it is said, is the tension between secularism and cultural nationalism. The second (Marxist) line of analysis links the crisis to the logic of capitalist development and the inherent contradictions of this process, exacerbated by liberalization and economic reform, which are finding expression in the widespread social conflicts enveloping Indian society (Prabhat Patnaik 2000). The third argument contends that the troubles of the state are political in origin and do not result solely or even primarily from socioeconomic crises. This line of argument points to the deinstitutionalization of the Congress and the breakdown of patron-client relations brought about by democratic mobilization and expansion of political participation. Since the 1990s, the dominant consensus has been under serious attack from several quarters. An important factor discrediting the state is its failure to promote substantive and equitable development for the vast majority. Not only is economic availability deficient in aggregate terms, access to basic goods and services is very unequally distributed, and is determined not only by wealth and asset positions, but by a complex system of patronage and clientelism in rural and urban India. This is not because social welfare policies are difficult to accomplish, but owing to the lack of a substantive commitment on the part of the state to welfarist goals and an insensibility towards the marginalized. The state's response to collective disadvantages is restricted by its focus on social discrimination and cultural subordination, and not the broader social debasement on account of poverty. This has meant a relative neglect of social welfare and programmes directed specifically to the economic condition of the poor (Mendelsohn and Vicziani 1998: 157). It is clearly a case of deliberate neglect bolstered by the lack of strong support for government intervention within the state apparatus, and a dearth of a strong political organization of the deprived outside the state pressing the government to implement its own policies.

Fifty years ago, when India embarked upon its tumultuous journey as a democratic-cum-developmental state, effective political participation was limited to a small number of Westernized elite. In a little over fifty years, democracy has struck deep roots in India (Yadav 2000). Regular and free elections have been held to the legislatures at the national and regional levels. There is a wide range of groups actively participating in the democratic arena. Most striking, the historically disadvantaged groups are among the more active and enthusiastic participants in this process. As a result of this participation, the locus of power has shifted from the established upper-caste elite to new upwardly mobile groups, and from the centre to the regions and localities. Generally, social and economic change has watered down historically rigid hierarchical structures, social discrimination and cultural attitudes. However, the advancement of social equality could not overcome the unequal economic structure of Indian society, reinforced by uneven distribution of gains under a predominantly capitalist society. Structural change of society and economy have continued at an uneven pace. India has had to contend with the persistence of mass poverty and illiteracy, intolerance and communal violence, and ethnic conflict and political insurgency. The democratic upsurge has forced political actors to pay more attention to the needs and preferences of the ordinary citizens. The state structure has institutionalized the political and ideological changes from below in the form of institutional innovations. Federalism, decentralization, coalitions, to name a few of them, have given the elite an opportunity to link social and political change. Facilitating this process was the purposive effort of the state after Independence to reconcile the gains from economic growth with the distributive hopes of democracy. But the retreat of the state in the 1990s under the influence of neoliberal ideas and right-wing politics, cuts in public expenditure and low tax revenues—all of which contribute to stagnation—are likely to reverse this process at the expense of the poor. Paradoxically, the state which seemed autonomous and stable when Indian capitalism was relatively weak, has actually come to face a more serious crisis with the entrenchment of capitalism. Its problems have been compounded by conflicts between the economic demands of liberalization and the political compulsions of democracy. The imperatives of economic liberalization are identified with an aggravation of conflict between economic and political interests. Political empowerment of the people

requires giving greater attention to the interests of the disprivileged, while economic liberalization hurts their interests in a material sense. The disparity between liberalization's economic agenda supported by the middle and upper classes, and the empowerment agenda beneficial to the vast majority is at the heart of the state's present crisis. The only way to mediate the conflicting logics of economic and social/political transition is a more concerted pursuit of social justice to usher in an equitable redistribution of resources and opportunities. This demands new and imaginative strategies to surmount the cleavage of deprivation and inequity between classes, castes, communities, genders and regions. Above all, it demands a continued emphasis on equity, decentralization of decision making and economic resources, and greater public investment in infrastructure, to ensure a decent living for the poorest sections of Indian society. The essays brought together in this collection address some of these issues. They are by no means exhaustive in terms of either dealing with various aspects of the state, or in examining different approaches adopted to study it. The collection offers a glimpse into the processes of state formation, concentrating on the possibilities that were available to the leadership, and theorizing about the choices made. It is an exercise in understanding the trajectory of the state from the vantage point of social change under democratic conditions, and reflecting the reasons that might have facilitated and hindered this transition. While each of the essays has its own specific theme, they highlight individually or collectively three themes that have dominated the career of the Indian state in the last fifty years. These are the constraints on economic development imposed by the class project of the bourgeoisie and the state's failure to carry out the transformative agenda to its logical end; the increased tensions between a strong centralizing government and decentralizing tendencies; and the increased participation in electoral politics of groups long considered peripheral which has exacerbated pressure on the cohesion of political parties and the response of the state to the political battle for equity and justice. Sudipta Kaviraj essays the historical trajectory of the modern state in India. Partha Chatterjee addresses the issue of state and planning in order to enquire how planning can become an instrument of politics and power. Achin Vanaik examines the relationship between class power and state power, Prabhat Patnaik traces the changing role of the state in economic

development, and Pranab Bardhan looks at the challenges facing the state from liberalization and globalization. Ashis Nandy's essay examines the changing relationship between state and society and how the state has come to dominate, not serve, civil society. Rajni Kothari offers an analysis of the state's ideological and institutional crisis. Atul Kohli's analysis converges on the struggles of domination and opposition in the national political sphere to explain the roots of the simultaneous tendency towards centralization and powerlessness. Francine Frankel delineates the political processes that have contributed to the restructuring of dominance and state power, and D.L. Sheth delves into the changing public discourse on the state policy of affirmative action and its impact on the structural transformation of the state. The state's relationship with minorities is explored by Zoya Hasan through a discussion of the issues raised by the passage of the Muslim Women's Bill in the aftermath of the Shah Bano case. Jan Breman's article offers a sharply critical account of the deepseated connections between the bureaucracy and local power. Akhil Gupta constructs an ethnography of the state by perusing the discourse and practices of corruption at the lower levels of the bureaucracy.

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PART I

2 The Modern State in India SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ It is a tiresomely standard procedure in political analysis to investigate between the state and society. What this really means, or what this exercise will yield cognitively, cannot be clear unless we know what exactly goes into these two concepts, and how their conceptual boundary is established (Mitchell 1991; Nettl 1968). It sometimes appears from the absentminded use of these concepts in modern social analysis that state and society are transcendent ideas, applicable without difficulty to all times and spaces, similar to the culturally neutral descriptive terms of natural science. The point is that even about such concepts as states and societies, which are presumed to exist nearly everywhere, it is necessary to enquire about the conditions under which these may be appropriately—or indeed felicitously —used. After all, these terms have histories, in two rather interwoven ways. They have a history, first, in the sense that the exact connotation with which they are used today arose in early modern Europe, under circumstances which may not be readily replicable elsewhere. These were terms that were given their precise modern connotation by the struggle of political agents to make sense of and describe transformations of the conditions under which they came to live from the 17th century onwards (Skinner 1989). Second, within the history of the West, the meanings and practical significance of these terms periodically underwent quite significant alteration. The term ‘state’ came to denote a specific type of organization of social power which arose with Western modernity, but the structure and sequences of this modernity differed significantly between England, France and Germany. Each of these specific histories contributed something to the complex associations condensed into the current meanings of these terms. It is this

composite and historically complex concept which became sufficiently widespread in the West by the late 19th century to enter the descriptive language of modern social science, which arose around this time. The currency of the underlying ideas of social science came increasingly to structure everyday concepts in society, and these appeared to be obvious and unproblematic, a common part of the furniture of social reality to be taken for granted. The naive Eurocentrism of early social science discussions of the non-Western world extended this descriptive language to social objects of other societies, so that often the referential power of this language called a ghostly modern world into existence. 1 Following greater critical awareness in modern social theory against this form of Eurocentric thinking, it becomes necessary to ask first whether political authority satisfies all those conditions in Third World contexts for the term to apply. Eventually, we may not be able to dispense with the term ‘state’, but we may be able to treat it with historical sensitivity, use it always with an implicit question mark, and acknowledge its cognitive provisionality. Again, ‘society’, thought the most trite of all social science terms, is not without its own historical complexities, if it is not being used in its blandest sense to denote any human community with some form of organization, which makes it so general as to be explanatorily toothless. If the term ‘society’ is used with sharpened and more specific definition following Toennies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft , its conceptual value is enhanced, but its applicability to societies like premodern or even contemporary India becomes problematic. The vocabulary of modern politics, shaped in the historical transformations of Western societies from the 17th to the 19th centuries, uses three fundamental ideas interconnectedly: (a) the self-defining individual as a maker of choices, including the elective formation of his own identity along with a large part of the furniture of the world; (b) the society as a field in which such choosing and self-interest-maximizing individuals come together to set up transient groups based on their common interests; and (c) a state which establishes a ‘monopoly of violence’ over this field of constant competitive life between possessive individuals. Clearly, these three ideas are internally related and interdependent: it is assumed that a state of that kind exists only in the context of a society of that sort, which, in turn, is composed of individuals of that possessive self-choosing variety. The fit between these terms and the historical reality they collectively

represent is so close that sometimes it is difficult to deploy these words in any other sense. The purpose of such a sharp presentation of the internal logic of these concepts is to remind ourselves that they contain nothing less than an ontology of the social world in an abbreviated form; in the analysis of Third World societies and the movements of power within them, such an ontology, which we are invited to take for granted implicitly by the terms we use absent-mindedly, cannot be simply assumed. The task of political analysis in the Third World is a particularly tricky business, because if we do social science, we must use this terminology, however provisionally, but it is this terminology that we must constantly mistrust and invigilate. To use a language, and to keep a constant eye on its delusions and slippages is not, by any means, a simple task.

Premodern ‘States’ If social languages contain condensations of history, it becomes necessary, first of all, to set out clearly what might be different in the structuring of political life in India from the form made common by Western modernity. Clearly, Indian society is not marked by an insufficient differentiation of political authority or social stratification of groups. 2 By the evidence of modern historical research, 3 political arrangements in traditional India appear to have been stretched over three distinct levels, with their relations undergoing fluctuations (as distinct from change in a particular direction) 4 over the Braudelian long term. The micro-foundations of power lay in the structure of village communities over which regional kingdoms exercised a real and proximate political authority. At intervals, these regional kingdoms were subordinated by majestic formations of large, temporarily powerful empires. Despite their spectacular character, and the disproportional attention these have received from political history, these forms were fragile and unenduring. Power at the level of the village community tended to be exercised through the paradoxical logic of the caste system. Its specific manner of allocating productive functions and rewards maintained a system of social repression without making specific individuals the agents of these relationships of disdain and resentment. The global human world, its essential principles of ordering, were not subject to individual or collective construction. The doctrine of karma provided a pseudo-causal explanation of specific human destinies and the

mutability of political fortunes, without attributing these to individuals’ agency in the modern sense. 5 Neither individual good fortune nor misery was caused directly by human acts. Caste also established a system of differentiation of status and political authority. This derives from a principle, formally significant, if not always practically observed, which broke up the hierarchy in society in an asymmetric fashion. The main peculiarity of the formal structure of the caste system is a principle of disaggregation of hierarchy. If the general idea of social hierarchy is disaggregated into distinct gradients of status, power and economic control , under the ‘pure’ principles of the caste system, each criterion would yield a different ranking order of social groups. The political implication of this feature of caste society is important. Under this arrangement, it is impossible for the state to aspire to become the site of universality and sovereignty; the state could not claim a Durkheimian majesty by becoming the symbol of society as a whole, and a preserver of its form and continuity. That was lodged in a self-maintaining moral order to which the state was normally subordinated. The major distinguishing feature of this kind of relation between the state and society appears to be that social disciplines, the mechanisms which ensure continuity of social practices and give them structure, were instituted and held in place by an impersonal, often uninstitutionalized, religious order. The state, far from being the force which created or shaped or changed this order, was itself subject to its control. Its primary function was to police possible infringements, not to make rules affecting the fundamental order of social relations. Curiously, if the role of the ruling power is seen in this fashion, we detect a peculiar symmetry between the structure of the caste system and the Islamic social order (Ali 1991). In both systems, the state or the ruling power did not have any fundamental legislative authority in the modern sense, precisely because society did not function on the assumption of the basic plasticity of the political and social worlds. A second distinguishing feature of this traditional form was that, unlike the territorial divisions of the national state, each significant practice would have a territorial structure specific to itself. An economic region, unified by a specific material culture—houses, food, utensils, and the transactions of craft and trade activities—would be quite distinct from a region which had common religious or doctrinal unities with the same ritual practices,

festivals and religious customs. Such territorialities (in those cases where a practice had a territorial base, and, of course, in many cases, it did not) obviously did not coincide with the territorial boundaries of political formations, which fluctuated a great deal due to conquests and warfare. Religious and economic domains demonstrated greater stability in comparison to the high mortality of ruling dynasties and their generally fragile states. Thus, different types of serial power—the power to set norms and authoritatively interpret them, the power accruing from control over economic assets—could be distinguished fairly sharply from the power of political rule and administrative control, and had geographies peculiar to them. Most significantly of all, this meant that the allocation of resources to various social groups on a permanent or stable basis, was beyond the recognized domain of authority of the traditional state (Bayly 1988; Washbrook 1988). The state had the discretion to tax severely or leniently. It could cause or end wars, but its power to reorder the structure of productive roles which determined everyday destinies of individual men and social groups was severely restricted. The political architecture of traditional India appears to have been divided between the levels of the village , where people spent most of their lives, a small subregion dominated by local landowners or those who exercised some form of control over land, the major source of power, and regional kingdoms which persisted over long periods though the dynasties which ruled them often tended to be shortlived. Above these structures grew the spectacular architecture of great empires which rose and fell with strange regularity, preventing any sedimentation of structures or political practices over a long period of time. What is remarkable in this traditional relation between ‘state’ and ‘society’ is the peculiar interweaving of change and changelessness. Political boundaries changed constantly, and on the evidence of modern research, it seems that there was development of trade activities of considerable extent and refinement before the advent of the British. 6 The durability of the basic morphology of social arrangements of the village community is equally remarkable. The elements in these arrangements often changed, but their relations did not. The durability of the rural cell and the vulnerability of the massive empires, showing an inverse relation between scale and effectivity, was a major feature of the political life of traditional India. What is called political in our modern language is distributed across levels and layers of the social formation in a

very unfamiliar manner. This gave rise to a very significant feature of social life in India, noted by such diverse observers as Marx (1975 [1853]) and Tagore (1912): the state was of a curious marginality to the fundamental processes of everyday life of society. Empires, however large, powerful or ambitious, never aspired to overcome this marginality to the daily existence of the villager: this was formally sanctified by the typical rent-receiving relation between the empire and the village. Rent is a symbol of this exteriority: as long as the rent was extracted, the political regime did not arrogate to itself the right to rearrange productive, or, more generally, ordinary social relations. The intense everyday repressions of the Hindu social order could not be directly attributed to the state structures or political regimes. These had to be seen as the impersonal functioning of the structure itself, or to the Brahmins as its accredited upholders. The great reform movements in ancient and medieval India were anti-Brahminical, and generally turned their wrath against the social structure, not state institutions, and in large part, refrained from being political. Thus, the precolonial type of political authority seems strikingly devoid of two features that social struggles of European modernity imparted to the modern state. It was not an authority for appeal against widespread structural injustice, oppressions, iniquities or irrationalities of social processes. It could not be expected to rectify them, because it had not created them. It was grossly disproportional to attribute such durable systems as the caste order to such a brittle and mortal thing as a momentarily spectacular empire. States were too short-lived to be responsible for such immemorial practices. The state had neither the great advantages nor the great responsibilities of being the ‘universal’ institution, which assumed at least symbolic responsibility for society's general good or evil. Social conflicts were not taken to it for settlement, adjudication or even the ultimate settlement by violence. To apply the state/civil society distinction to traditional India, therefore, would be to invite a serious conceptual misunderstanding.

The State of Colonial Modernity When British rule was established in colonial India, several crucial changes were seen in this arrangement. The state of British colonialism bore with this earlier state of affairs a peculiar and complex relation (Kaviraj 1994).

British viceregal administrations fluctuated between two rather diverse policies towards the strange, complex, intractable land they had brought under colonial political control. Initially, British colonial power acted as the successor to the Mughal empire, which meant that it would have to act within the general rules of marginality and majesty, translated in the more concrete economic side into primarily rent-extracting arrangements. Socially, the colonial state contented itself during these phases with maintaining a minimal colonial order, which meant essentially the conditions of its financial and mercantile extractions from Indian society. It did not evince large reformist pretensions. The state of British imperialism, in its days of unquestioned hegemony, could hardly accept such a traditionally marginal role, because that went against the fundamental principles of modern state sovereignty. Three types of interference in society were later introduced by the colonial administration. The first type, the least deliberate, least political in its narrow sense, but of the most far-reaching consequences, was the introduction through the discourses of the colonial state of the language of the new ontology of the social world. This rationalistic image of the world was persistently legislated into the existence—or as close to existence as possible—of a new kind of world made up of untraditional, and, therefore, unfamiliar definitions of individuals , of property , of ‘society’ in the Western sense and of the state , which simply assumed the powers of sovereignty to which it was by this time thoroughly accustomed in its European habitat. Its unprecedented enterprise of mapping and counting through censuses and surveys suggested and provided a new way of being in a new type of social world, with enormous political consequences for public action. Second, the state actively encouraged some processes of reform, not merely introducing individually significant alterations of the social order, such as in the contentious abolition of sati, but in establishing the principle that the state had the authority to do such things, a principle without precedent in Indian social history. Last, towards the end of the colonial empire, when the nationalist movement seemed to be gaining irresistible strength, colonial administrations showed considerable ingenuity in finding unexceptionably noble principles of political morality whose practical consequences would be to irreparably damage nationalist consolidation. Unexceptionable solicitude about the future welfare of minorities had the political

consequence of dividing the nationalist opposition to colonial rule, and of indirect incitement to religious separatism. Practical arrangements which inclined in this direction included the establishment of communal electorates; but far more significant was the encouragement of the idea that religious groups could not live together, and despite democratic constitutionalism, a religious minority would always be maltreated by the majority. If this argument was taken as justifiable, then the only answer to problems of social diversity was not democracy or federalism, but partition. The colonial version of the liberal state revealed two interesting features. Despite its claim to represent the universality of society and its indivisible ‘common good’ above all particular interests, and its attempt to create a legal, civil, public realm, it remained imprisoned within the traditional logic of marginality. Despite its spectacular theatre of self-presentation (Cohn 1983), the colonial state remained, after all, a rather thin stratum of institutions: its circle of activity remained narrow, confined essentially to the maintenance of colonial order and extractive economic functions. At the same time, its operations unintendedly created a limited public sphere around its major arenas of functioning, in which ideas about public life came to be disputed and discussed. These very ideas, introduced reluctantly and in suitably attenuated form by the colonial administration, of public power, responsibility, citizenship, legal restrictions on authority, and democratic rule, eventually went against colonial rule itself and provided the major ballasts for the arguments of Indian nationalists. The ingestion of these ideas and formulation of political practices in their terms also introduced a fatal flaw in the structure of Indian politics. As these concepts and their advantages remained more readily apprehended by the middle-class elite, and largely unexplicated to the ordinary Indian voter, who was nonetheless given the ceremonial sovereignty of popular representative government, this meant that a problem of intelligibility of the political institutions of the state remained at the heart of the Indian democratic system. Democratic institutions in India did not have a historical preparation through a political discourse which debated, in the vernaculars and in terms which reached the ordinary Indian citizen, why the state structures of republican, democratic, secular authority were better than other competing forms. 7 They remained, more crucially, unenlightened about the meaning and implication of the fundamental

gesture of constitutional subjectivity, of their having given that form of government to themselves. 8

The Modern Nation State A combination of fortuitous circumstances determined that the effective control of the state after Independence fell to a political elite around Nehru. It devised a basic design of institutions through fundamental policy decisions in the early years after Independence. There was an internal connection between the policies of economic development this regime sought to follow and the specific manner in which it structured the apparatus of the state. 9 Extreme political instability after Independence made it necessary to place immediate emphasis on the state's coercive apparatuses, and to ensure against the rhetoric of the nationalist movement, that crucial parts of the apparatus of the colonial state did not break down, plunging the new state into what could be terminal disorder. 10 The skirmish with Pakistan over Kashmir, the use of military force to integrate several recalcitrant states like Hyderabad into the Indian union, the threat of Communist insurgency in Telengana, all required a major recourse to the structures of army and bureaucracy the colonial administration had left behind. Thus, although the hesitation to alter the structures of the state after Independence was quite understandable, this meant that the new state immediately entered a life of contradictions. The national state was an inheritor of two distinct, and, in some ways, incompatible legacies. It inherited the colonial state's systems of internal command and control, its administrative ethos, its laws and rules, and its three predominant characteristics to the popular mind: its marginality, its exteriority, and its persistent repressiveness against the lower strata of the people, who, at least in constitutional formality, were made the repository of sovereignty. 11 At the same time, it was the successor to a triumphant national movement whose principal objective was to contest the culture of that state. Some of the ambiguities which had provided strength to the national movement, because it made it possible to draw on support from opposing social groups, now came to be issues of contention. The historical circumstances of Partition, dissidence, insurgency and war made it inevitable that the apparatuses left behind by the colonial state would not be dismantled, but actually reinforced. This relatively strong state could see

itself and act upon society in different ways, depending upon which ideological constellation established its dominance on the political world. Was the national movement a struggle to achieve an untrammelled version of the Western state, a purer form of Western political modernity than colonialism had permitted, 12 or to reject the entire model (Gandhi 1938)? Though the question was given a resoundingly modernist answer in the workings of the Constituent Assembly (Austin 1964), actually the forces which supported a leftist construction of modernity suffered a peculiar scattering by the early 1950s. The Communists, already embittered by the crushing of their insurgency, provided a different blueprint of leftist conceptions of modernity sharply critical of Nehru's more liberal version. More inexplicably, the socialists who largely shared Nehru's political views on matters of state construction, also left the Congress, leaving Nehru formally supreme within his party, but actually trapped amongst colleagues who shared little of his politics. His ideological isolation inside the party he led made Nehru lean increasingly on the bureaucracy, which enjoyed an enormous expansion after government policy sanctioned the creation of a large public sector of core industries (Potter 1986). This extension of public bureaucracy was, however, fraught with dangers and difficulties. The bureaucracy, though now manned by Indians, was still the unreconstructed bureaucracy of a colonial state: irresponsible, unresponsive, insufficiently used even to the rhetoric of serving the people, being habituated for so many decades to being their lords and masters. It was also eminently unsuited, in its original form, to performing modern welfare functions. More seriously, across the formally united bureaucratic apparatus of the Indian state fell the shadow of the great hermeneutic divide in administration. 13 Even when the upper echelons of the state apparatus, driven by the rationalist urge to legislate more equitous changes, enacted legislation or took administrative initiatives, because of the two hermeneutic spheres within the same bureaucracy, its lower orders translated these policies into unrecognizably travestic forms. Partly, this was done because that was how some of those principles appeared when translated through their more indigenous ‘common sense’ about political life, very different from that of university graduates trained in the particularly credulous early doctrines of development economics. It was partly a matter of brute political facts. Local administration was inextricable from local power. Its realities were

impossible for small clerks to defy on the strength of a most uncertain chance of salvage or support from distant centres high above (Frankel 1978). Ironically, tangible institutions of the state may be helpless against the intangible force of historically sedimented cultural understandings of ordinary people. Long-term historical memories and time-tested ways of dealing with power of the political authority took their revenge on the modern state, bending the straight lines of rationalist liberal politics through a cultural refraction of administrative meaning. The logic of new legislations was twisted to produce strange travesties, as happened, notably, in the case of Nehru's land reforms. Tenants were evicted on a large scale as a result of laws meant to alleviate their economic hardships. The relative stability of the Nehru regime and the absence of any serious electoral challenge to its power gave it some crucial time to practise democratic politics. It created a new arena of public life, which, like our public parks, was used only by the cultivated, leisurely, unthreatened elite. Although the Nehruvian elite did not begin their rule with a coherent ideological plan, through constant improvisations of the first decade, government policies gradually formed into an internally consistent strategy for the development of a reformist, politically independent capitalist society. Its greatest practical implication was to translate the aspiration of development into a huge state-centred project of social change. It was the state's task to confer and realize the rights of citizenship of its people, previously unaccustomed to democratic politics. Equally, it was the state's responsibility to abolish established social practices like untouchability, and to create conditions of economic growth. The questions arise: Was the statist translation of all objectives of development justified, entrusting to it the crucial responsibilities of industrialization, social justice, as well as public order? Was the basic equation of the idea of the public and the instrumentality of the state defensible? Was the modern state an instrument, as some claim today (Kothari 1989), which necessarily defiled everything entrusted to its care? Given the reading of history widely prevalent at the time, it is difficult to see how this reliance on the state as the only credible foil to the irrationalities and distributive failures of the market could be avoided. 14 Though, in retrospect, that reliance certainly seems rather naive today. In its own terms , the economic policies of the Nehruvian state enjoyed remarkable success on some fronts. It was, after all, an internally consistent

project which sought to pursue the rather discordant objectives of capitalist growth and social equity, the particularly unpropitious conditions of recent decolonization. Its primary objective was, understandably, to secure the new state from intolerable neocolonialist pressure by the creation of a capital goods sector kept firmly under state control. That certainly helped India to avoid falling into the kind of dependence on Western powers which marked the politics of Pakistan or South Korea. In the first stage of decolonization, that kind of dependency appeared particularly unattractive, though South Korea's recent economic growth has tended to throw a misleadingly benign light on that past. India's plan of industrialization also succeeded in fashioning a remarkably diversified economy, again meant to achieve import substitution. In retrospect, it appears that it became too successful in some respects, particularly in its obsession with an import substituting industrialization, and became inattentive towards rapid changes in the structure of the international economy. It also appears that the mixed economy—not surrendering the entire productive and distributive mechanisms of society either to the unrestricted rapacity of private business or to the chronic rheumatism of the state bureaucracy—introduced a longerterm check and balance relation in the political-economic system and increased room for manoeuvre. When it was necessary to curb the private sector, or restrict foreign imports, there was a sufficiently large and confident state apparatus to effectively implement those policies; when economic necessity required reduction of state control, there was a sufficiently large and effective market to perform that task. 15 Also, this kind of economic management certainly helped avoid strains resulting from either the productive inefficiency of the state sector or the distributive irrationalities of private industry. The success of such a mixed economy obviously required reliable feedback and constant recursive adjustments of macroeconomic policies. Planning, paradoxically, was a requirement for the successful growth of capitalism. After Nehru's death, his carefully arranged design showed surprising vulnerability, and its pattern of decline was curious. It began to be defeated from inside , rather than by an overwhelming coalition of forces opposed to its functioning. The whole pattern of development showed a curious internal insubstantiality after Nehru's death, and within ten years the structure of the Indian state and the field of political life centred upon it underwent some fundamental change.

Lines of Crisis of the Modern State What were the main features of this change? Rapid industrialization and subsequent social equity were the two primary objectives of the Nehruvian state. Its programme for social reform was not wholly disingenuous, but its strategy was entirely bourgeois. While it raised hopes for alleviation of poverty, it showed itself unwilling, in practical terms, to risk sacrificing the support of the propertied elements in Indian society for its immediate achievement. The state was the only agency in independent India which controlled resources on a scale sufficient for an ambitious industrialization programme. Besides, it was the only identifiable agency which could act on behalf of the whole society and withstand pressures from foreign governments and large corporations that could lead to the attenuation of sovereignty. Both these things meant that the state apparatus, run jointly by the bureaucracy and politicians, came to acquire a very large stock of assets of various types, from liquid cash flows, to capital stock, to control over infrastructure and services, and above all the unlimited financial support of the state budget. It is to be noted, however, that almost the entire justification of this huge expansion of bureaucracy and resources at the state's disposal was done in terms of its putative normative responsibilities for income redistribution. Following Independence, the state apparatus changed its character and mode of functioning because of pressures from society released by the democratic process, and through the operation of self-serving state policies. The formal structures of the colonial state could remain unchanged for long periods partly because it was not subject to democratic pressures. The functioning of institutional structures, parliamentary procedures, and financial canons of administration was easily intelligible to colonial administrators because they were drawn from an image of the state which had become part of the standard common sense about politics. Through their devoutly Western education, the educated Indian elite, who served in the colonial bureaucracy, or in the many consultative councils of the colonial state, or even those who opposed it in the national movement, shared this common sense. During the Nehru era, serious politics of the state, in bureaucracy, electoral politics and ministry making were essentially restricted to these social groups. With the emergence of politicians from social groups which were outside these circles of shared understandings,

such principles and their observance were bound to change. Thus, although the idea of democracy came from the West, the result of democratic politics was bound to make the political world less Western and more indigenous in cultural terms. These cultural changes were facilitated by significant social readjustments directly caused by the government's policies. Although the state neglected the agricultural side of planning and left the rural economy and political life to its own internal logic, some of the land reform legislation enacted in the 1950s came to have far-reaching consequences. Land reform legislation, meticulously planned by the bureaucratic and planning elite in the central government, was frustrated by the state and local leaders of the Congress by equally meticulous stalling techniques. For a long time, the actual historical significance of the reforms was overshadowed by a side issue about compensation to the former zamindars. Naturally, zamindars condemned the reforms as radical expropriatory moves aimed at the entire regime of private property. Radical opposition groups, like the communists, thought the reforms were a complete failure because they were unable to achieve what their declared objective was. Both extreme evaluations were wrong, in retrospect. Although the reforms did not accomplish the purposes declared in government policy, they did succeed in shifting power in rural India from older rent-receiving landlords to a new class of aggressive, politically ambitious and illiberal rich peasants. They wished, by virtue of their increasing prosperity, not to reform rural society and introduce new measures of equity, but to retain the traditional structure of irresponsible power of the landed elite and rightlessness of the poorer peasantry, and replace the old zamindars in the rural hierarchy. They looked at the concentration of resources in the agencies of the state with approval, since it was evident that they could exercise control over their disbursement through their influence over electoral politics. Thus, the ‘big state’ came to enjoy a miraculously overdetermined support from various organized groups, but for entirely different reasons. It was increasingly evident that the state was becoming a major producer and participant in the direct generation of resources. By its power of fiscal control and regulation of the economy, it could raise additional resources and influence economic processes of the private sector. It was, in any case, the primary controller of the flow of foreign capital which would come into the economy through aid. Four major organized groups supported the state's enhanced role with

distinct types of self-interested expectations. Business interests, though initially mistrustful of intervention, eventually realized the importance of the cheap infrastructural support that the public sector provided them, and naturally appreciated the severe protectionism of the nationalist government. A large class of entrepreneurs and contractors found easy and secure incomes from state contracts through political patronage rather than facing the uncertainties of market competition. Rich farmers, now within striking distance of control of lower levels of state apparatuses, were enticed by its ability to disburse resources and subsidies, while continuing to benefit from its generous refusal to impose an agricultural income tax. The large social group of managerial and bureaucratic personnel, of course, belonged to the state itself, and any extension of its powers was an extension of their own authority and prospects of enrichment. Finally, the organized sections of the working class were beneficiaries of incomparably better conditions of service and entitlements relative to unorganized workers, not to understand the importance of the state for their own sectional interest. Only some segments of the high bourgeoisie in India offered some principled resistance to the idea of a large state with powers of licensing and resource control. Most other segments offered disingenuous support for the idea of a redistributive state with enormous powers of bureaucratic obstruction and disbursement of resources. All these discrete interests found shelter behind the uplifting argument that a large interfering state was required for the expeditious achievement of greater social equity, if not a mild version of socialism. Thus, already, at the end of the Nehruvian era, a strange inversion had taken place in the arrangement and functioning of India's expanding state apparatus, inscribing it with the mark of indelible bad faith. Already, the thinking and serious argumentation behind it was getting displaced by a very different actuality. Early redistributive ideas were turning into its rhetoric, or its ideology covering and justifying actual forms of private aggrandizement mediated through the state machinery. In ideological terms, this was a bizarre situation: systematic advantages from the state were drawn by bourgeois groups of various descriptions, but it became easy for advocates of a free market to blame the irrationalities of it all on the evident drawbacks of a socialist command economy. As a consequence, a turn to liberalization and free markets may be ideologically easy to accomplish, but actually hard to translate into reality, precisely because several groups which are meant in theory to benefit from

liberalization policies, are themselves secretly wedded to this strange form of ‘socialism’. Some other developments in the culture of the state apparatus resulted from the ambiguities of Nehruvian development thinking. After Independence, the Congress party witnessed a process of demobilization, and an internal redistribution of importance between ideological leaders and greyer functionaries who worked as power brokers. The Nehruvian worldview had a contradiction at its centre between the rhetorical idea that the masses are the creators of history and a pragmatic mistrust of their ability to think rationally even about their most local needs. Thus, political practice moved in two entirely different directions. Central planners and leaders spoke of politics as an instrument for the creation of a brave new world, a rhetoric that the historically shrewd Indian peasant regarded with some scepticism. By contrast, the intermediate level of Congress leaders, of distinctly lower moral stature, and often capable of resisting everything except temptation for financial and political gain, constantly engaged in small mercenary transactions on a local scale. The long-term historical memory of peasant society in India showed politics to be a highly arbitrary use of power in which there was, against a background of a social system that was unchangeable, a perpetual redistribution of benefits for individuals and small groups by manipulation of the only stable principle of political life—the fickle and transient favour of rulers. High-minded discourse about social change, equity and sovereignty thus appeared either as pure pretence, or external etiquette, ceremonial moves everyone made but no one meant seriously, while the actual business of politics was distribution of patronage. It is important to emphasize the duality of the political world of the Congress in the early decades: neither side of this was a sheer delusion, and in a strange way both these styles of politics, the idealistic and the unprincipled, contributed to the system's durability. Those who were irritated or appalled by the behaviour of one side were reassured by the actions of the other. This also lent a peculiar duality to this politics and made it unstable. The more idealistic central leaders were suitably incensed by the reactionary instincts of their provincial colleagues, but acknowledged that they could not win elections without their assistance. The state leaders made sense of the idealistic central proposals in terms of their common sense, through their own mildly self-interested conviction of the immutability of a caste-ridden, iniquitous, paternalistic world. So the

policy of state interference in the economy, advocated by Nehruvian reforms with the Fabian idea of imposing social rationality on the concupiscence of private business, was disingenuously welcomed by a new political class which saw new avenues of influence and irresponsible power of patronage. Increasingly, this new political class came to consist of two groups of people which were strategically placed in the system to exploit its benefits. The first was, of course, of bureaucrats to whom it offered a weapon for real or threatened blocking of proposals in the Byzantine system of licensing laws. By deft use of this power, private entrepreneurs could be divested of some of their unjustifiable wealth—though for personal, not social benefit. Not surprisingly, bureaucrats were swiftly converted to the cause of obstructive socialism. This is correctly seen as a major factor behind widespread bureaucratic corruption. Even if this does not lead to corruption directly, it does give rise to a reciprocity of interests between bureaucrats and business. Following the irresistible growth of the apparatuses of the state with control of large assets, a new class of professional politicians grew up through nearly half a century of parliamentary politics which recognized that electoral support gave it an ability to enjoy, a share of this large fund. These politicians are professional in a new sense. Unlike political leaders of the Nehru era, they did not (in most cases) have a secure alternative vocation. They have no profession outside politics, and consequently, their interest in politics is not only the power to shape policies, but also simple financial gain. This political bloc, consisting of the state bureaucracy and electoral specialists, has come to have a strange ideological and practical relation with the Nehruvian state. They have no enthusiasm for radical social reform for which it was originally intended, but still less for dismantling the licence-permit regimes and their increasing complexity. Since the mobilizations which put these politicians into positions of legitimate power were often based on particularistic interests, like caste or regional dissatisfaction, their distribution of state patronage usually followed those lines, and the more openly particularistic these policies were, the better the case for other groups to do the same when their respective agents came to power. 16 Not surprisingly, the idea of Nehruvian reform, or planning, or social control over the means of production have long been abandoned by centrist political parties, but that did not lead to any suggestion of slimming down the state, which was meant to be an instrument for those goals.

Rapid industrialization implied the rapid expansion of an industriallybased professional middle class—managers, engineers, small businessmen thriving on captive state controls, intermediate functionaries of government. Besides creating direct employment opportunities, the public-sector industries required an enormous bureaucratic back-up to supervise, control, keep in touch with and take account of its operations, and this meant a proportional increase in supervisory ministerial staff. Since it was bureaucracy which was entrusted the task of checking bureaucracy, it benefited rather disproportionately from the process. A socialism which meant expansion of employment opportunities for the educated and skilled labour and did not threaten immediate levelling of social inequality was naturally popular with the middle classes. Ironically, the class which benefited greatly from Nehruvian strategies but felt deeply disgruntled was the richer peasantry. Official pronouncements of the Nehru era said that the main beneficiaries of the land reforms should be the poorest in the countryside; in fact, it was to the richest farmers that the gains of the dissolution of feudal classes accrued. The swift change to the Green Revolution strategy for agricultural growth in the early 1960s created wide opportunities for growth which they could exploit because the class above them had been destroyed and the state supported them with subsidies. Their newly acquired economic power naturally made them impatient to translate it into political supremacy. Initially, their resentment against Congress policies, which, despite their advantages, they saw as being partial to industrial groups, was expressed through the formation of many farmers’ parties in the 1960s, and their shift of electoral loyalty to the opposition contributed substantially to the Congress defeat in the fourth general elections. 17 Later, these groups tended to return to the Congress after Indira Gandhi's government effectively renegotiated the distribution of economic benefits to their great advantage. This group too forced its way into the common fund of the state both in the form of subsidies and support prices for its agricultural commodities, and direct access to state assets by its dominance in electoral politics of states. Through a combination of these processes—the creation of new social classes due to capitalist growth and their particularistic political strategies— state-sector industries began to decline rapidly in their economic performance, and showed a spectacular combination of inefficiency, wastefulness and unresponsiveness to legitimate criticism. Ironically, the

continuing rhetoric of socialism by which these entrenched groups responded to such attacks ensured that all the sins of the state sector were attributed to the ideology of socialism, and used as evidence of the utter inappropriateness of socialist economic principles to achieve economic growth. Actually, the lessons to be learnt from the decline of the Indian public sector could be just the reverse. The use of public resources for private ends and the bending of collective principles of operation to a new form of prebendalism and electorally sanctioned privilege have hollowed out all vestigial ‘socialist’ pretences of the public sector. 18 What has failed decisively is, therefore, not the public sector that Nehru established, but a travesty which had, taking advantage of the absent-mindedness of the political public, usurped its name and symbols. Instead of showing that the public sector had failed, the Indian experience shows beyond doubt that the sector had failed to remain really ‘public’ in any reasonable sense of that term. The exact nature of the crisis which has been slowly spreading over the state is quite complex. The democratic and reformist rhetoric of Nehruvian politics in the first decade after Independence irreversibly altered one of the fundamental facts of political life in India. From an agency which was spectacular, mysterious and distant, the state has become something vast, overextended, extremely familiar at least in its sordid everyday structures— the panchayat, the revenue department, the local courts, the post office, railways, public-sector industries, and above all the elections, an ambiguous combination of serious decision making, social festival and farce. Nevertheless, it seems that its domination of Indian society, in some form or other, is historically irreversible. The policies of the government may veer from interventionism to free market. Even the structure of the state may be relatively large or thin; under liberalization, it may shed some of its present responsibilities. But its general title to legislation, forming rules which society has to live by, cannot be contested. Even to impose self-denial, or curtailment of its apparatus, it must exercise sovereignty. In some ways, the Nehruvian state was a victim of its own success: because it was too generous with its promises, people have come to expect a great deal from its operation, and its obviously expanding assets. The arbitrariness of its local operation heightens this familiarity, and this means that by suitable manipulation its attention could be turned towards any social group, not just the ones which were traditionally most powerful.

Some disadvantaged groups may believe, quite rationally, that they may be better off under a system of random and arbitrary patronage than one of systematic exclusion. 19 The popular reaction to the irresponsible, arbitrary image of political power has often been somewhat paradoxical. It seems to support democracy because it creates conditions under which individuals from relatively backward groups can enjoy this power. It does not press for an eradication of arbitrariness from political power by imposing stringent procedural regulations on its use. This is reflected in the fact that electoral politics has bred populism rather than a stricter regime of rights. A second line of the crisis of the state can be seen in the paradox of participation. The logic of historical change—the growth of a modern capitalist economy and the introduction of parliamentary democracy—led to an initially hesitant, disproportional and skewed process of participation of common people, and a slow but discernible decline of passivity in the face of income and power hierarchies. Capitalist development has not been able to introduce a textbook form of random mobility—what Gellner calls social entropy—but it has created enough avenues for economic advance for lower groups to undermine belief in economic predestination. The Nehruvian political design extended a historic invitation to poorer groups to participate more widely in the making of political decisions affecting their collective life. During Nehru's time, the idea was too novel to be used on a wide scale. Nevertheless, continuing electoral politics, the decline of overwhelming Congress preponderance, competitive bidding by political parties for the electoral support of the poor have certainly widened the circle of political participation in India quite dramatically. Greater participation has paradoxically brought liberal procedural principles under strain (Kaviraj 1991). Of course, this is not entirely historically unprecedented or theoretically unpredictable. The relatively less romantic strands of political theory accepted that practical worlds of democracy departed rather drastically from the moral visions of popular sovereignty. The singlemindedly economic interpretation of national development which the Nehruvian regime pursued, in retrospect, extracted a rather heavy price. In a world which is fully enumerated sociologically, all identities can become candidates for political loyalty, not merely the nationalist one. Specially in a rapidly changing society like modern India, people can alter their collective self-description from Indian nationalism to something else quite suddenly, in search of a better deal from the state. These alternative

identities can be either a different conception of Indian nationalism, Hindu nationalism, for instance, or various subnational ones which may, in a fluid world in which territorial sovereignty is seen as provisional, aspire to separate statehood. In this historical context, their choosing of identities, what they foreground and what they reject, must be substantially a matter of public debate. People must be given reasons for imagining themselves as Indians, to vote implicitly in favour of the Nehruvian nation state in the ‘everyday plebiscite’, against all other possible selves—not once for all times, but constantly, recursively, in an argument that runs fairly distinctly through the necessary complexity of their chaotic everyday experience. This process of the cultural reproduction of the nation, and its subtle reconstruction at various historical stages, was fatally neglected by the elite that came to power after Independence. Its economic dominance of society is still largely intact, because the economic prosperity of the intermediate classes has not come by expropriation, but by the creation of new sources of wealth which did not threaten the prosperity of the conventionally privileged. The translation of economic power into political influence has, however, imperilled the advantages of the traditional elite. Their secure political eminence is now threatened by aggressive intermediate classes which consider the apparent openness of liberal structures fundamentally biased against their entry, and thus use redistributive rhetoric to displace the former elite from positions of strength and capture those positions themselves. Typically, the supporters of policies of reverse discrimination in favour of lower castes are not concerned about more equitable distribution of educational opportunities or material necessities. For them, getting a share of bureaucratic control is vital. They do not want to destroy a system of inequality, but only demand their fair share in its privileges. There is no doubt that great numbers of Indians have responded to the historic invitation to political participation, occasionally in ways which liberal purists would not approve of. The more ordinary people write what they feel about the political world, the more unfamiliar that world becomes in some important respects. The tremendous salience that the politics of caste and religion has assumed in recent politics, is certainly related to the processes of democratic assertion. Here, too, a cautious comparison with Europe is useful. In Europe, the process of the establishment of a secular state (which did not discriminate between subjects on the basis of their religious beliefs) was in large part concluded before the emergence of

democratic government in the late 19th century. In India, the processes of political secularization and democracy have appeared simultaneously, and the historic relation between them has proven to be more complex than originally expected. Theoretically, there is a possibility that if politics becomes genuinely democratic in one sense—coming into line with what the majority of Indian electors consider reasonable—it might become wholly undemocratic in other ways, such as in disregarding the rights of minorities. This trend towards a majoritarian translation of the idea of democracy is to be seen not only in the disturbing rise of the BJP and Hindu communal organizations, but also in the rhetoric of democratic intolerance of other groups—caste mobilizations, regional movements, which, in the name of their majority, in a conveniently delineated territorial area, propose to reduce the rights of others, that is, to use the power of democracy to introduce systematic discrimination. Paradoxically, the greatest historical threat to democracy in India today seems to be a peculiarly intolerant doctrine of majority rule, which claims that electorally returned majorities can legitimately abridge the rights of others, turning them from random, episodic minorities into permanent ones. The constitutional rhetoric of the Indian state places emphasis on three distinct principles of modern politics: sovereignty, democracy and socialism. Evidently, these do not, in the turgid and complicated discourse of Indian politics, mean what they imply in textbooks of Western theory. Despite their irredeemable triteness, they seem to convey some important truths about the nature of the state in India. It is easy to detect a reference to three distinct tasks that the modern state had accomplished in Europe over a period of several centuries. The first is the task of creating a Weberian monopoly of violence, bringing the processes of society under the disciplining control of the state, begun by European absolutism (sovereignty). The second was the task of making this sovereign state responsive through institutions of popular participation (democracy). The third was the conversion of that state and its bureaucracy into a major instrument of social change and distribution of welfare (socialism). The modern state in India has sought to telescope all these objectives into a single process, in a relatively short period of time. The historical efforts of the colonial state and its nationalist successor accomplished the first task. The second process also met with considerable success in the 1970s, though the consequences of popular participation have been complex and often

unpredictable. It is the last aspect of the modern state's workings which have been rapidly travestied, a caricature that turns the idea of socialism into a protection of privilege rather than a pursuit of equality. Experience and dissatisfaction with its performance have given rise to an interesting debate about what should be done about its various failures and repressions. It seems unlikely that the centrality of this state to the life of Indian society would disappear or decline appreciably.

Notes 1 . What I mean is that it was simply assumed that social entities like the state, or the market, or the bureaucracy existed in these societies, that what these terms referred to were similar to the objects found in modern Western contexts. 2 . I am using the concept of stratification in the most general sense. Dumont has argued against its use to refer to caste organization. See Dumont (1985: Ch. 1). 3 . There is a wealth of recent research on political forms in traditional India. See especially Bayly (1988), Chattopadhyay (1983), Price (1991), and Stein (1982). 4 . This is to guard against an indolent teleological view that there was a tendency towards gradual centralization of power in Indian history which came to its conclusion with British colonial rule. 5 . The 19th century Bengali writer, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1892–1981) offers an ingenious gloss on the doctrine of karma in his Samajik Prabandha , viewing it as a version of a theory of causation. 6 . There is a controversy about whether there could be an indigenous development towards capitalism in India on lines very similar to those in early modern Europe. The major argument in favour of this line of thought is the substantial expanse of trade networks; the argument against would be that capitalism does not mean only the expansion of trade and mercantile practices. There is no doubt that traders and merchants accumulated enormous amounts of wealth and were willing to use their financial power in the political game. The support that the British received from some of these retail enterprises was probably critical for their success in the early contests for regional supremacy. 7 . It would be grossly misleading to suggest that state structures and legal forms were not discussed around the time of Independence. The Constituent Assembly of India held detailed and often acrimonious debates on these issues. My point is that this remained necessarily an elite discussion, and due to its excessively legalistic character would have been unintelligible to the ordinary person. Indian nationalism did not take time to create a popular common sense around its democratic institutions; their desirability was essentially taken for granted. 8 . ‘We, the people of India…give to ourselves this Constitution.’ This is the crucial trope of the Constitution which put this in the preamble in a deeply ambiguous move. True, the insertion in the preamble made its provision non-justiciable and thus less serious. The preamble also had great symbolic and celebratory value, and in a sense governed the

technical legal principles of the document, and was therefore of considerable significance. 9 . One of the major shortcomings of the literature on political economy is its unwillingness to see the reciprocally determining relation between the structure of the state apparatus and the nature of policies. 10 . Nationalist analysis of the colonial state saw the police, the bureaucracy and the system of education as the three main pillars of the colonial rule. Yet, nervousness about stability and fear of an utter collapse of law and order prevented the new rulers from proposing any reform of the police and the bureaucracy. Once their ‘colonial’ structures were implicitly ratified by the new regime in its early formative years, it was very difficult to restructure them later. 11 . It is quite evident that the tradition of ‘popular sovereignty’ had the greatest influence on Nehru's own political rhetoric. Although he often emphasized the inevitable moderateness of democratic government, usually against communist exhortation to expropriate the rich, the major strain of his definition of democracy was as a government of popular sovereignty. 12 . Which was obviously the Nehruvian reading of the historical significance of Independence. For a clear exposition of his ideas, see Nehru (1958). 13 . I have tried to argue elsewhere that a simple transfer of a Weberian model to Indian bureaucracy is explanatorily unpromising, precisely because the entire structure could not function as a unitary force in the way Weber indicated. Cf. Kaviraj (1984). 14 . For instance, Rajni Kothari's own earlier work (1970), a very influential statement of how the Nehruvian framework functioned, was not critical of the state. I have tried to suggest that in making such judgements we should not be wholly anachronistic (Kaviraj 1995). 15 . For enthusiasts of the free market, the enormous difficulties of Russia in reinventing a market system from nothing should be a chastening experience. 16 . These sorts of tit-for-tat rounds of patronage distribution have been common feature of much state politics in the last two decades. 17 . In the fourth general election held in 1967, the Congress was defeated in most North Indian states by coalitions of opposition parties in which farmers’ parties figured prominently. 18 . Except perhaps in a few remaining areas like distribution of subsidized food through the fair price shops in cities. Even there, there are allegations of large-scale corruption, and simple bureaucratic blockage of the access of those who deserve support. 19 . Indeed, this is how some lower-class politicians often argue against the horror of more privileged groups at the disregard of procedural norms, which, they allege, are unjustly tilted towards groups with established cultural privilege.

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3 The Political Culture of the Indian State * ASHIS NANDY The Indian polity as it was conceived forty years ago has been redefined by recent history: the state has come to dominate, not serve, civil society. As the state grew, the focus of national politics also shifted, from Parliament, with its dialogue between governments and parties, to the media. In this new forum, in the slick monologues of advertisements, political personalities, not party platforms, are marketed for public consumption. One victim of this new political culture is democracy itself. While democracy remains the ideal of the Indian masses, to sectors of the nation's elite it has become suspect; they fear it threatens to disrupt the management of the future. The most prominent feature of Indian political culture in recent years has been the emergence of the nation state as the hegemonic actor in the public realm. The nation state has been an important actor in the Indian political scene during the last four decades, but it has shared the stage with a number of political forces. Now, for the first time, the nation state has moved to centre stage and has hardly any competition from the other actors in the public realm. From arbitration in the matter of art and literature to the correction of Indian shortcomings in sports, virtually every sphere of life is now under the jurisdiction of the Indian state. 1 Generations of Indians exposed to the colonial culture and brought up on Western knowledge systems have waited for the day when a powerful Indian state would belong to them, be an exemplar and a social arbiter, protect them from their non-Indian tormentors, and play the central role in transforming the society. Yet, now that that golden day has arrived, one hears little applause. Instead, Indians seem split in their opinions.

First, there are those brought up under the colonial dispensation who cannot believe their eyes when they encounter a formidable nation state. They continue to see India as a small, besieged, newly independent nation buffeted by internal stresses and external conspiracies. To them, India has no control over its own destiny as yet, for such control would require an even stronger nation state, backed by even greater armed strength, and an even larger urban-industrial base. There are other Indians who, though aware of the new power of the Indian state, have no conceptual frame in which to fit that awareness. They see power seeping out through the fingers of citizens and being concentrated in a state apparatus wedded to gigantism and bureaucratic centralism. They want to believe that internal reforms of the Indian state will one day remedy this situation. Brought up on the 19th-century European dream of capturing state power, either through a revolution or the ballot box, they see the modern nation state as part of a universal sociology of politics, the career line of which in India has been distorted by local social and cultural influences. Once the distortions are taken care of, they say, the state will begin to represent the true interests of a majority of Indian citizens, distributing the accessories of the good life all around. Last, there is a small number of Indians—mostly representing some vestigial forms of Gandhism and post-Maoist Marxism, and the rest being activists and scholars with no clear ideological position—who are trying to interpret the burgeoning peasant movements and the self-affirmation of a variety of minorities, from the tribals to the landless labourers to the untouchables. This small group of people has begun to think that the problem with the Indian nation state is not its failure but its success, and that they are now dealing with a state which represents an exaggerated and partly pathological extension of the normal anxieties of a post-colonial society. In terms of the task of state formation that it set before itself at the time of Independence, India, they believe, has made it, and the more pressing political problems the country now faces they attribute not to the faulty implementation of a great vision, but to the attempts to realize a vision, which, however reasonable at one time, has in recent years become inadequate. Where did the dream of the Indian nation state begin to go sour? The answer, to the extent that any is possible, lies not in the history of the Indian state—precolonial, colonial, or post-colonial. It lies in the changing idea

and/or mythology of the Indian state and the diminishing ability of the modernist vision to mobilize the enthusiasm of the 1950s and 1960s. It was, after all, within the vision of those times that the now-dominant mythology of the Indian nation state was born.

Traditional State Versus Nation State The precolonial Indian state, defying the classical treatises on the subject, was never, an empirical reality derived from theoretical postulates. No such applied political theory could have worked in such a highly diverse civilization not blessed with an authoritative cultural centre. A culturally well-defined, internally consistent concept of the state in India could survive only as an experience in ex post facto theoretical reconstruction, mainly in textbooks (see Jayaswal 1943). The traditional idea of the state in India (contrary to popular belief) grew the hard way—from attempts to give theoretical meaning to the idea and to impose a normative order on unavoidable empirical realities. The traditional idea of the state was a post facto justification of a slowly emerging political order built on existing political practices. The idea was often an overarching construction that retrospectively coped with the heterogeneity and contradictions inherent in Indian politics. It was a projection of, and a means of dealing with, a chaotic political reality. This, however, was not the same concept of state advocated by the first generation of post-Independence Indian leaders. Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and Babasaheb Ambedkar—who among themselves did so much to give an institutional basis to the presently dominant idea of the state in India—may have differed ideologically, but they all opted for a concept of the state that was only a minor variation of the post-17th-century European concept of the nation state. All three rejected some of the major articulations of the concept of the state during the pre-Gandhian and Gandhian phases of the nationalist movement, specially the articulations based on pre-British experiences and experiments. The post-Independence elite borrowed their concept of the state ‘rationally’, on supra-political grounds, from the concept of the dominant in the politically ‘developed’ societies. These elite were fully committed to the idea of the nation state as it had grown over the previous 300 years in the West, since the Treaty of Westphalia, particularly since the British and French had established their

global hegemony in the 19th century, and Bismarck had created a proper nation state in Germany. Not that the elite were unaware of some of the problems associated with this idea of the state. But they handled them by developing a slightly unorthodox idea of the nation state—as a temporary compromise with the unhappy, primitive diversity of India, which over time they expected to disappear so that a modern nation state in its pristine purity would emerge (Nehru 1972). This compromise—built on, some may say, the typical Hindu genius for hypocrisy—managed to marginalize the traditional approach to the state, as the approach was operationalized by India's precolonial rulers facing the country's mind-boggling amorphousness and diversity. The postIndependence elite tried to function with an imported concept of statecraft, legitimated in terms of the traditions of India's high culture and adjusted to suit the country's needs, as the elite read those needs. Two expectations grew as by-products of this process of adaptation. Both had to do with the concept of the ideal society—that is, a society suited to the modern nation state system—implicit in the new ideology of the Indian state. The first expectation was that, with modernization, a more coherent form of Indianness would emerge and the diversity of the country would diminish, to make India more governable. The second was that, over time, the compromised form of the nation state would give way to its working according to the universal principles of statecraft and able to persuade, mobilize, or coerce the society to adjust to the state's ideology. These expectations were written not only into the formal ideology of the state, but also into the systems of political socialization and education the Indians evolved and built into the urban and semi-urban middle-class culture of politics, the latter deeply influenced by India's colonial state system, on one hand, and by awe of Europe's achievements in statecraft, on the other. This influence explains the full support that the concept of the nation state received from quarters that might have been expected to be ambivalent towards the concept—those upholding the cases of the various religious and ethnic groups, specially the Hindu revivalists. The latter, for instance, did not plead for an indigenous Hindu concept of the state, except when they were extrapolating into India's past the modern concept of the state. Being the illegitimate offspring of the Raj, they wanted to do to the non-Hindu minorities and to the West what they believed the West had done to the non-West and to the minorities and the weaker sections of the West

itself. As the moving, if somewhat pathetic, last testament of Gandhi's assassin made clear, they wanted a Bismarckian Prussian state in India and held the ageing Gandhi responsible for sabotaging the project through his superstitious dependence on ideas like soul force, fasting, and nonviolence. The modern concept of the nation state has now begun to dominate the public realm. Not only have the last forty years created enormous vested interests in the concept, but almost the whole of modern India has come to see the nation state as the only valid, possible concept of the state, as an institution that should have absolute priority over all other aspects of Indian civilization. The nation state has acquired enough clout to resist all demands of Indian society that clash with the needs of the state. The society is now required, in every instance, to adjust to the state. This reversal of relationship has concretized the idea of the state. The state now has greater empirical presence and more historical content. The idea of the state with which Indians worked after Independence had a mythic quality about it. The classical Indian state and the state in India's epic traditions had survived mainly in the minds of men, not in historic reality. The concept of the perfect Indian polity, as it supposedly existed before outsiders spoiled it, has always been the bugbear of hard-eyed native historians. However, a case can be made that the mythical nature of this perfect past was as obvious to the sly, devious natives as the Chinese concept of an ancient golden age was obvious to the hard-boiled Chinese peasants. True, the ideal Indian State like any other mythic structure, could arouse passion and allegiance, but they were of a different kind. The Indians talked with reverence of Ram rajya , literally, the rule of Lord Ram, but also a moral polity. It is doubtful, however, that they expected it to be realized. In an epic culture, the idea of Ram rajya bridged the sacred and the preferred, the transcendental and the everyday, what was and what could never be: the idea was a means of criticizing the present rather than an attainable blueprint for the future. Some of the historic states too were mythologized in the popular culture. But for the historically-minded, the states of Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka and Akbar had little to do with what the historians tell us about them. They had more to do with the political awareness shaped by the nationalist movement, with trying to discover in the past a baseline for social criticism in the present. If I am allowed the use of my own cliché, India's past has

been traditionally open-ended; her present and future are open mainly to the extent they are seen to follow from its past. Today, the Indian nation state resides less and less in the minds of men; it is primarily what the Indians confront on the ground. The vagueness, chaos, deliberate obfuscation, and inability to close up definition or mark out conceptual boundaries which so enrage the tough-minded political analysts in India are now giving way to the sharp operational definitions that the moderns relish. The range of options once available within the Indian political culture has begun to narrow. Take a simple example. Gandhi—the real one, not his namesakes— pleaded for Hindustani as the national language of India. One can insist that Hindustani is nothing more than the lowest common denominator of a large number of Indian languages, mainly Hindi and Urdu. One can organize a first-class, unending debate on whether Hindustani is bazaar Hindi or bazaar Urdu, whether it has a literature or not, whether it can be written better in Devnagari or in Arabic script, whether certain Indian languages are closer to Hindustani or to Urdu, and whether Hindustani is a language at all or just a humble dialect. Hindustani is everybody's language and yet nobody's. Few passionately love it; fewer hate it. This situation gives rise to a play in language politics that Hindi cannot give. Hindi is more clearly defined: it has a literature identifiably different from Urdu literature (though it was not so at one time); it has forms that immediately allow one to locate the speaker in a social hierarchy. As with English, if you speak bad Hindi in a certain way, you can still be located by someone who speaks good Hindi in another way. Like English again, Hindi allows certain communities to gain political and economic advantages through language skills, and it creates the basis for a community that can be politically mobilized. (‘Hindi heartland’ and ‘cow belt’ are now well known terms in the political geography of India.) Hindustani is the language of a plurality of Indians in one way; Hindi is the language of a plurality of Indians in another. I use this example not to initiate a debate on India's national or official language. Much can be said about why Hindi was ultimately chosen, not Hindustani, and the politics of the choice. Even Hindi, when it was chosen, was seen by many as a confederation of languages having blurred sociopolitical and geographical outlines. I use this example to mark out a political consciousness that was once central to India's political culture but

which has become increasingly marginalized. It is the consciousness that prompted India's constitution makers not merely to avoid using the expression ‘national language’ but to declare all the major regional languages, including Hindi and English, official languages. If Indians were writing the constitution today, they would do what they often inadvertently say: they would declare Hindi the national language, English an additional official language, the other major Indian languages regional languages, and the rest dialects or local languages. The former approach is congruent with the traditional Indian idiom of political pluralism, the latter with the idiom of the nation state system and its preferred mode of aggregating interests and subnational cultures. The former defines and justifies the centre in terms of the peripheries; the latter defines and justifies the peripheries in terms of the centre. The former cannot conceive of the centre without the peripheries and values the centre, because the peripheries are valued mainly as the extrusions, instruments, and constituents of the centre. The former takes to autonomy and dignity of the peripheries as axiomatic and sacrosanct. The latter takes a more imperial and instrumental approach towards the peripheries and views the centre as the ultimate repository of the principle of the civilization. The choice of official language also hints at another kind of change taking place in the political culture of Indian politics—in the relationship between the classical and the folk and between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ within each tradition coming into contact with the modern state. There is something in the nation state system that pushes it to split a culture into its high and its low components, to glorify the former and devalue the latter. High culture is usually more sharply defined and stable than the low, and cuts across a large number of regional cultures and helps aggregate them for policy purposes. High culture is also primarily the culture of the elite, with whom a functioning state has to establish at least a quid pro quo. When a high culture homogenizes a community's lifestyle, it has the advantage of not seeming a great calamity to the community, for usually the classical enjoys a higher status in a society. Thus, the Indian nation state, like most other nation states in the southern world, has been constantly trying to promote classical culture as the core of its identity and to establish a political understanding with that culture. On the other hand, the Indian nation state has become increasingly dismissive towards culture as it is lived, as opposed to culture that can be museumized

or put on the stage or into reservation. When development experts and social workers speak of the obstinacy and the unwillingness to learn of the Indian, they often have in mind the philosophy and culture of everyday life and the scepticism of the Indian peasant towards modern medicine, agronomy, forestry, and so on. When these professional well-wishers speak of the catholicity of the Indian, they usually have in mind the high culture— the shruti texts, some of the Upanishads and Vedanta, and the less obstreperous Brahminic sectors that are willing to legitimize the new and the powerful. The main point, I hope, is clear. The culture of Indian politics has in recent years depended more on a mix of Indian high culture and the metropolitan culture of the nation state. The traditional dialectic of the Brahminic and the non-Brahminic, the classical and the folk, the textually prescribed and the customary practice has been bypassed. Indian political culture is moving away from the pluralism that the culture of the Indian state was conceptually derived from and legitimized by a variety of political cultures or ways of life. The new culture of the state has come to depend more and more on the expanding pan-Indian, urban, middle-class culture, serving as an emerging mass culture. This mass culture is not the central tendency of the diverse popular cultures of the different regions of India but an identifiable, will-bounded culture like that of an American-style melting pot.

The Ideology of the Nation State and Nationalism The shift from the older culture of pluralism to the pluralism of the melting pot has been accompanied by four changes in the relationship between the state and the society. None of the changes is unique to India, and it is possible to see them as unavoidable in a multiethnic, diverse, Third World society. It is even possible to make a case that these changes have begun to push India into the mould of a normal Third World polity, facing all the usual problems of such a polity. In other words, it is the changing relationship between the state and the society that is standardizing India as a proper Third World country, not its poverty or low urban-industrial growth.

Changes in Relationship between State and Society

One change is the growing tendency of the Indian elite to identify the development of the state with development in general. Not only does the Indian state hegemonize all social resources, it eats up an increasing proportion of the resources. If one takes into account all the state's expenditures on itself, it can be said to have successfully cornered all conventional targets of development; it primarily develops itself. Even when the state invests in conventional development, say in primary health care in rural areas, the lion's share of investment goes to the various wings of the state, to administration and state-employed professional services, to the establishment of state-owned pharmaceutical factories, to ‘nationalized’ medical education and public health research, and to the health planning process itself. In addition, much of India's most spectacular achievements in recent years have been in defence and defence-related technologies and manpower. These achievements are seen by the Indian elite not as deviations from development but as intrinsic to it. As the country's internal problems fail to justify further strengthening of the coercive power of the state, such justifications are sought in the perceived hostility to India of—alas—all its neighbours. The presumption is that the empowerment of the Indian state automatically and by itself ensures the survival of India. A second change is a growing tendency to identify the secular-rational processes of the state with the tolerance of ethnic and cultural diversity. The tendency has already made the strengthening of the Indian state the index, for modern Indians, of the integration of the minority cultures into the national mainstream and the management of ethnic conflicts by flattening diversities. Not only are Indians becoming more dependent on the state to ensure ethnic tolerance, but virtually every ethnic conflict or interreligious feud is now taken to the state for arbitration. Yet, given that a modern state tends to be wary of all forms of ethnicity, more so if they seem unable to cope with the state's demands, such arbitration has ceased to be impartial. All too frequently, the ruling party, the opposition, the police, the bureaucracy, and to an extent the judiciary, get involved in ethnic violence as partisans—a hazard common to states the world over. These factions also, reluctantly but surely, try to take political advantage of such involvement. 2 A third change is that the state has established close, inviolable links with megascience and megatechnology, not only because it must depend on

modern science and technology to give teeth to its coercive apparatus, but also because it can use the achievements in these sectors, specially when they are spectacular, to legitimize itself as a repository of scientific knowledge and a negation of native irrationalities. The scientific temperament as an ideal (which has spawned a mass of officially sponsored statements, exhibitions, and associations) is central to this link between knowledge and power. The idea originated both in the theory of the white man's burden and in the ideologies of the 19th-century reform movements, religious as well as secular. Rammohun Roy, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda, and Syed Ahmed Khan are examples of social thinkers and reformers who thought that the Western scientific tradition would enliven or reactivate the indigenous cultures in the subcontinent and ensure their survival in the contemporary world. In the context of Europe's ‘successful’ use of the culture of scientific rationality, Indian society, to these thinkers, seemed mired in tradition— superstitious, stagnant, and apolitical. Now this civilizational difference has been internalized and the same discourse elegantly adapted for use against the old India. 3 In the process, the principles of the scientific temperament and cultural evolution have become two-pronged weapons. They prompt a constant search for grand technological and organizational feats as evidence of the cultural superiority of the new elite, and a search for spectacular examples of the decadence or retrogression and irrationality of everyday life as evidence of the cultural inferiority of non-modern Indians. Once again, what was diversity has become a scaled-down homogeneity, in which the entire society is seen walking, slightly out of breath, the inclined plane of history, with a large part of it trailing behind an ‘enlightened’, self-confident minority. Consequences of Change Two major political-cultural consequences have resulted from these changes. First, there is growing impatience with politics and the democratic process in some sections of modern India. These sections have not given up on democracy, but they believe it has gone too far and empowered the irrational and atavistic elements in the society. One aspect of this impatience is to constantly search for technological and managerial fixes to bypass politics. This search has thrown into relief the stronger faith of the lower rungs of Indian society in democratic institutions and electoral politics.

The discomfort with competitive mass politics that parts of India's traditional social elite have demonstrated can be explained by their decline in social dominance, brought about by electoral politics. The process started in the 1930s; electoral politics after Independence hastened it. This part of the story is well known. What is less known is the spread of this unease in modern India in recent years. On one side are the new urban elite—the professionals, the media experts, the scientists, and the new generation of industrialists who have internalized the 19th-century British elite's fear that democracy itself might begin to threaten freedom and rationality if those with specialized, up-to-date knowledge are not allowed to have direct access to power, bypassing the democratic process. On the other side are the right and left radicals of various hues, led mainly by individuals from India's modernizing elite, who, displaced from the political centre by mass politics, are trying to re-enter the political stage, this time as expert wellwishers of the people. A second consequence is that Indian nationalism has begun to adjust to these changes. The nationalism that the Indian freedom movement left behind was a political as well as a powerful intellectual and cultural critique of the modern West. This critique, derived from the syncretism of the Indic civilization, was an attempt to cope with and understand the West in terms of native as well as Western categories. The categories came from diverse sources—from Western rationalism (many Indians found the West deficient in Western terms), from socialist and liberal thought (which offered partial critiques of modernity), from Indian traditions and the specialist carriers of traditions (who found the Western enterprise immoral, unethical, and philosophically unacceptable), and, above all, from Gandhi and his followers (who sought a traditional basis for culture with an updated sense of evil so as to criticize not only the West but also certain aspects of Indian traditions). Such a nationalism had to include a critique of Western nationalism, and some pre-Independence Indian thinkers did provide the outlines of such a critique. What many Indian and Western observers found unacceptably wishy-washy in Indian nationalism was its rejection of the hard-eyed interest- and realpolitik-based nationalism. The Indian freedom movement ventured a low-key, amorphous, tolerant, peculiarly consensual nationalism which was a constant criticism of the steamrolling, ‘mature’ nationalism so adored by many Westernized Indians.

A good example of the spirit of this nationalism is that India has two de facto national anthems: Rabindranath Tagore's ‘Jana Gana Mana’ and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's ‘Bande Mataram’. Both are in Bengali. (The Urdu song ‘Sare Jahan Se Achcha’ by Muhammad Iqbal, the cultural hero of Pakistan, comes close to being the third.) India is unique in having neither of its national anthems in the national language. This multiplicity of anthems reflects a nationalism that refuses to be fully defined. ‘Jana Gana Mana’, despite being the national anthem of a postcolonial society, is one of the least nationalist anthems in the world. It celebrates an open-ended, non-chauvinist concept of Indian civilization. ‘Bande Mataram’ is only partially an invocation to Mother India; it is also an invocation to Mother Earth. It is an indicator of the changing mood in India that recent attempts have been again made, after a gap of nearly forty years, to discredit ‘Jana Gana Mana’ by alleging that it was originally a paean to George V, the British sovereign. Obviously, it is not an anthem the tough-minded Indian neonationalists are enthusiastic about. Some of them, seeking to make up for what the anthem lacks in toughness, have tried to make the singing of it compulsory. Only a few have seen these attempts as an assault on the spirit of the anthem (Nandy 1983). While the idea of nationalism as a universal concept, with a universal content, takes hold of the Indian mind, more and more Indians seem to be losing confidence in their own version of patriotism and in their own concepts of state, governance and integration. Urban middle-class Indians, the ones with most exposure to the mass media and easy access to contemporary political ideas, now believe that those who do not follow the standard definition of nationalism are doomed to be dominated and marginalized in international affairs. These Indians are willing to depend on the nation state to forge national unity and to shed the slogans of the earlier generations of political elite—such as ‘unity in diversity’ and ‘coexistence’—as effete clichés. On the Indian middle classes there has always been a fringe yearning for a nation state with one religion, one language, and one culture, for that was what the Western societies seemingly had. But the mainstream of the freedom movement wrested the model, partly out of the need to mobilize a highly diverse society for political purpose, partly out of a commitment to Indian civilization, seen as dependent on this diversity for its survival, and

partly out of a concern with the fate of the civil society in a country in which everybody at some plane was in a minority. That resistance is now weakening. All said, the nationalism independent India inherited was based on the idea of confederation. India was unwilling to sacrifice the interests of its citizens for the sake of an idea shared only by the country's modernizing elite. That meaning of nationalism is now changing. There is now a sizeable number of Indians whom the new nationalists would love to call the true Indians. They are the modern Indians with a pan-Indian consciousness, fully committed to the culture of the nation state, uprooted from small local cultures but having some access to the Indian high culture. These ‘true’ Indians have introduced to the political scene a brand new concept of Indians, which is not so much a statistical central tendency or a selfconsciously chosen artefact as an empirical reality. The problems of national integration and ethnic violence in India have much to do with the distinction between the two forms of nationalism and the gradual loss of status of the indigenous form. National integration in India is now less often negatively defined; it less often means the survival of all Indians in their own ways of life and suspicion of the textbook concept of the nation state. Nor does it allow much space for the various Indian concepts of a civil society or for the real-life Indian speaking in thousands of voices.

The Iron Law of Indian Politics One consequence of the growth of a pan-Indian middle-class consciousness, a homogenizing nationalism and a centralizing nation state, is the emergence of a cycle in electoral politics. Both have been underwritten by the fact that, though the form of the Westminster model survives, the substance is now popularity contest-like referenda, hitched to an Americanstyle elective monarchy, with many of the major political parties reduced to being electoral machines. The most distinctive part of the story is the cycle. As a part of it victories in national elections tend to be decisive; the electoral support base of the victorious tend to shrink halfway through the term, and either the opposition or a part of the ruling coalition, in the garb of the opposition of a mixture of the two, captures power in national elections to begin the cycle

all over again. In all this, the media, the volatile middle-class public opinion, and the fledgling mass culture play crucial roles. Thus, every regime comes to power with a flourish, arousing high expectations and enthusiasm all around. In the first half of its term, it looks invulnerable, gets good press, and enjoys the confidence of the intelligentsia and the urban middle classes. During this period, almost all criticism of the regime seems unsupported, ill-bred, and even paranoiac. Halfway through the term, the expectations catch up with the regime and the walk downhill begins. In the second half, any support given to the regime looks dishonest or self-interested, and no amount of populism and media management makes it looks convincing. Most thinking Indians spend the second half of the term worrying about what a desperate regime may do, and about the long-term fate of Indian democracy. The cycle became a sort of iron law in the early 1970s, when elections came to depend more and more on populist slogans and promises and when though opinion engineering in mass media, the rise and fall of regimes and reputations began to be brought about, and, at times, stage-managed. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi set the ball rolling with the help of a cadre of clever, urbane bureaucrats and political advisers whose main skill was the management of media, and, through it, of middle-class public opinion. As part of their style, they also acquired and popularized a radical idiom to serve as a source of their legitimacy. This was the first time that the media were used in the fashion and that a coalition of ‘committed bureaucrats’, ambitious academics, journalists, and a new generation of palace politicians having no background in the Independence movement was forged in Indian politics. Enormous expectations were aroused by these media managers and performers. Predictably, within a few years, despite their success in the Bangladesh war and in the testing of a nuclear explosive at Pokhran, both significant media events and vote-garnering devices, the ruling party faced a disappointed public. The enormous expectations led to enormous frustrations, which found expression not only in anxiety about the working of the system but also in widespread anger about corruption in the upper political rungs. A number of popular movements broke out in 1973–74 to challenge the legitimacy of the regime. When, in 1974, Mrs Gandhi declared the Emergency, she confirmed what was obvious to many, that she had lost the battle for political survival.

The Janata government dutifully replicated the pattern. The euphoria it generated when it came to power in 1977 started to evaporate in one-and-ahalf years. And as the new incumbents were in the older mould of the organization men of the Congress party, poorer in public-opinion management and without much understanding of political salesmanship, the Janata cycle lasted a shorter time. Mrs Gandhi went through the same script when she returned to power in 1980, and her son, who entered the scene in 1984, now faithfully acted it out again. Rajiv Gandhi started in 1984 with a clean slate. He did not have the quasicriminal record of his late, much lamented brother. Better still, he did not have any political record at all. As a result, he looked especially clean in a system, which to a large number of Indians had begun to look shockingly criminal. It was widely thought that he meant well, was not particularly beholden to special interests, wanted to make a break with the past and institute a more open style of politics. It is an index of the power of the Iron Law that, with his political fortunes in decline, Mr Gandhi reacted in the same way his mother did when her grip on power slackened. There were the same hired crowds for rallies, the same strident attacks on dissenters, the same attempts to choke off the political process by linking the fate of India to the fate of his government, and the same hoary idea of a universal anti-India conspiracy. The operation of the Iron Law interlaces with larger problems of Indian politics. Though in the second half of a term, when a regime is in decline, it may seem as if all the institutions in the public realm are under equal stress, they are not. Many of the institutions are resisting the decay now evident in the Indian party system and political decision-making structures. Parts of the higher echelons of the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the armed forces, for instance, have resisted, though not always successfully, institutional decline. A regime, however, is primarily a political entity and it acquires buoyancy from its political health. Under the Iron Law, the decline in the political health of the system is a prime minister to the despondency of the second. The cover-up also ordains that, during the first half, no proper political instrument could be forged to pursue—or to give the impression of pursuing —the goals on which there is some national consensus or on which the support base built during the elections could be sustained.

In a de facto presidential system, the euphoria of the first two years and the feeling that elections are won through the management of media and middle-class opinion has an important byproduct. The leader becomes suspicious of the formal political apparatus and tries to acquire a ring of ‘trustworthy’ advisers from outside formal politics to devise the means to bypass the political process and keep the politicized Indians apolitically busy, that is, depoliticized. Naturally, only relatives, close friends, technocrats, and politicians without a base can provide such apolitical trustworthiness. Sports extravaganzas like cricket matches and the Asiad, cultural shows like the Festival of India and Apna Utsavs, and spectacular technological circuses like space flights and Antarctica expeditions can become the means of bypassing an unmanageable, unclean political process. Such events mobilize the political support of the temporarily depoliticized, newspaper- and TV-bound middle classes, willing to buy claptrap about computers and the 21st century, by which they understand little more than the achieving of Western consumption standards. Politics, however, cannot be swept under the rug so easily. It has the tendency to return at the first opportunity. Also, when the political process is forced underground, it cannot be easily monitored. Thus, Mr Gandhi was forced to return to the politics swept aside as too dirty—the tired demonology about ill-intentioned neighbours and eager superpowers seeking to destabilize India with the help of internal saboteurs, the engineering of xenophobia through hints about minorities in league with foreign powers, and the constant attacks on institutions that resist state encroachments on their autonomy and their democratic rights. Inevitably, there was strong reaction to the populism and the overdone realpolitik. A number of public figures found it convenient to emphasize the importance of political norms at a time when all mentions of norms became indicators of political naivete. Thus, for example, Mr V.P. Singh, who rebelled against the Congress leadership, managed to politicize morality at a time when it was waiting to be politicized. Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, with his constant emphasis on publicity, and N.T. Rama Rao, with his saffron robes, as well as erstwhile Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde, with his idea of value-based politics, had already shown some awareness of the widespread anxiety about the state of Indian politics; Mr Singh came out of the heart of the system to respond to these anxieties.

Mr Singh's political skills may have been limited and his vision shallow. He may have self-consciously been imitating the late Mr J.P. Narayan, who brought down Mrs Gandhi's regime in the mid-1970s by similarly politicizing what looked like a moral crusade. Yet, it does seem that had there been no Mr Singh, the Indian system would have invented one. For he is only a projection of the advertised image of Mr Gandhi, the image which won Mr Gandhi his electoral victory. Mr Singh is a living warning that one hazard of theatrical politics is being forcibly cast in someone else's political morality play. Since the 1950s, a number of commentators on state formation and nation building have argued that that one aspect of political underdevelopment is the absence of impersonal, self-interest-based political realism. The Indian elite, too, have often pined for the golden days of the Arthashastra , the ancient text on hard-eyed statecraft. Mr Gandhi, in 1984-85, with his promise to clean up politics, was seen by these elite as a perfect example of a politically unskilled neophyte. Yet, it was this touch of innocence which was his main attraction to the electorate. To many, he was correcting for the excessive Machiavellianism of his mother. Since he entered the dominant culture of politics, Mr Singh took advantage of the resulting void and stepped into an available role. Despite what looks the inexorable logic of the Iron Law, in retrospect we can see that some options were once open to Mr Gandhi. He could have ridden the demand for moral politics, for he was well positioned in the first half of his term to do a part of the work that needed to be done. He did get praise for his anti-defection bill, designed to curb the legislators’ propensity to switch parties for personal gain, even though many of the state units of his party and he himself had been involved in the defection game. He could have scripted a popular morality play if, after his expensive campaign, he had changed the system of electoral financing so that he did not have to depend on kickbacks from defence purchases or largesse from business houses. After all, such dependence had already become risky, thanks to the same media explosion of which his mother and he himself had made such excellent political use. He could have even purged the Congress party of some of its more notorious criminal elements: there was no chance of anyone rebelling at that time. He did none of these things. He spent time on grand spectacles—cultural, political, and technological.

It followed that, till the next elections, the temperature in Indian public life would remain high. There would be state-sponsored chauvinism in international, affairs and suspicion of minorities, dissenting ideologies and alternate ways of life. The pressure on the press and civil rights groups, too, could have risen, as the public mood turned more hostile to the regime and the regime struck back. Under the circumstances, the job of the opposition seemed cut out for its numbers. Obviously, they would have to work towards ending the present regime unheroically when its term was over. Any attempt prematurely or artificially to finish the regime could allow it to steal the mantle of the opposition the way Mrs Gandhi did in 1971. Similarly, any attempt to act out a demonology could misfire, as Mrs Gandhi and her entourage found out in 1977 and as the Janata Party stalwarts Messrs Charan Singh, Madhu Limaye, and George Fernandes discovered in 1980. The opposition would also have to keep public scepticism alive about ultranationalism, so that it did not become an instrument of electoral mobilization. The analytically obvious, however, is not the politically feasible. The main opposition parties shared with the ruling party the same political culture. The leaders of those parties were not equipped to look beyond the culture that sustained them so long and gave meaning to their lives. Despite them, however, that regime, like all regimes during the preceding two decades, could lose in the next elections. But the new regime, too, would face the same problems and the same scenarios unless it had the courage to tackle (in the first half of its term) the unpleasant and persistent problems of the Indian political culture. This long discussion of the culture of new politics should ideally be matched with a detailed discussion of the new kinds of persons who can survive or succeed in Indian politics. I shall shirk that responsibility and only summarize my reading of the situation here. A valuable clue to the personality of the new politician and the changing psychological demands of Indian politics was provided years ago by A.K. Roy, a Marxist trade unionist, in the form of an obituary for Babu Jagjivan Ram, the Congress leader who had the longest tenure as a cabinet minister, from 1937 to 1980. Deeply respectful towards Ram's enormous political and administrative skills in the obituary, Roy recognized that the Indian political system had a place for Babu ji , as Ram was affectionately called, even if the old warhorse never really knew what to do with that place (Roy

1986). What Roy implied but does not say was that, after nearly fifty years in a successful political career, towards the end of his life Babu ji had to face the fact that time had passed him by. A highly intelligent and sophisticated man, Babu ji had in his life effortlessly straddled colonial and post-colonial politics and urban and rural India. But his unphotogenic, crude, dhoti -clad looks the ‘Babu’ in front of his name, which identified him as an outsider to the emerging culture of mass politics in India, his lowkey image and subdued style, his dependence on traditional organizational and institutional processes for his political power, specially his masterly understanding of caste and factional alignments, even his mode of using political corruption—in fact, the entire configuration of qualities that made him such a formidable political presence from the late 1930s to the mid1970s—had ceased to be an asset by the time Babu ji died in 1986. Not that the qualities and traits had become irrelevant to Indian politics, but only that other qualities had become more important at the highest level of public life. Thus, the Jagjivan Rams can no longer be advertised or sold by the media as prime-ministerial material. They cannot interest the urban middleclass Indians who have begun to set the pace in Indian politics. As the place occupied by the Jagjivan Rams has shrunk, Indian politics has become more open to new sets of public figures who represent other configurations of skills. One particular set that has become salient in the last several years deserves mention, for it seeks to be a counterpoint to both the traditional political bosses and the ‘amoral’, ‘pure political’ set operating on the borderlines of the law within the system. This set is represented by public figures who have remarkably sparse knowledge of the political role of caste and other traditional loyalties, whose access to the traditional lifestyle and ways of thinking is primarily second-hand, and who, when they speak of organizations and institutions, mainly have modern organizations and institutions in mind. Even ten years earlier, Sam Pitroda and Romi Chopra could not have dreamt of having the political presence they had then. Their urbaneness, look, dress, and accent and even their Anglicized first names would have seemed politically esoteric and would have handicapped them. Between the Jagjivan Rams and the Sam Pitrodas lie, however, a whole range of political functionaries who have been brought up in the older culture of politics but who know that its days are over. They are trying desperately to retool themselves, to adjust to the new concepts of political

craftsmanship. One guesses that at least some who have distinguished themselves in recent years, by forging a comfortable bonding between crime and politics in India, are persons who feel that they have only pushed to a logical conclusion what they see as the political success of the amoral instrumental rationality of modern technology and opinion management. The late Erich Fromm, old-fashioned though he may seem to the world of psychology today, perhaps had a concept relevant to what the Indians are witnessing today. Certainly he would have been delighted to find in Indian politics a near-perfect instance of the character type he used to say had a marketing orientation, represented by persons who are in business not with commodities but with their own personalities (Fromm 1955). In a manner of speaking, these persons do not have an identifiable core; they change to adjust to their contexts, to whatever is politically useful and/or profitable. Scholars interested in the vicissitudes of the self in Indian culture will not be terribly surprised if one proposes that Fromm's marketing orientation may be the prototypical pathology of the Indian self in a mass society. When Arun Nanda of Rediffusion, the advertising agency that marketed Rajiv Gandhi during the elections then, proudly says that he had a good product to sell (The Indian Express , 24 February 1985), his concept of goodness derives from the idea of saleability, and that saleability in turn is connected to a particular form of indefinability. This indefinability invites the buyers to project their own ideologies, stereotypes and desires onto the product being marketed; it also allows the sellers to change the content of the product overnight on response to public demand. While the likes of Mr Jagjivan Ram also showed chameleon-like qualities when the situation demanded, and while their political allegiance might be on sale, their selfhood was not. They could not alter their personalities according to a script fashioned by public relations consultants in response to the latest popularity polls. In this respect, the new demands of Indian politics are not very different from similar demands in other competitive, democratic systems. From President Ronald Reagan to Member of Parliament Illona Staller alias La Ciciaolina, from Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to actor-turned-freewheeling politician-and-businessman Amitabh Bachchan—in each case one is dealing with a person who has the capacity to reflect the middle-class self-images in slightly exaggerated versions while maintaining the accessibility of the images, intellectual, moral, and political.

In large, complex, open systems, the accessibility is partly ensured by analysing all dissent that comes from outside the systems in pejorative terms derived from the ideology of the systems. In such analysis, increasingly available in a packaged form in the liberal democracies, working among the tribals and the rural poor becomes romantic Gandhian obscurantism or left-wing adventurism, ethnic demands get identified with fundamentalism, and all peasant movements become the self-assertion of kulaks. Once dissent is redefined this way, the more unpredictable dissenters can be handled in two ways. Their capacity to exercise their democratic rights can be reduced by building a consensus against them through the manipulation of middle-class opinion. (The rights are never abrogated as in authoritarian polity, but they are to ‘lapse’ by the manufactured forgetfulness of the vocal citizenry.) Alternatively, such ‘eccentrics’ are occasionally allowed into the mainstream under sufferance, as a means of fixing political opponents or as living certificates to the openness of the system when they gatecrash into the mainstream on their own. Show business in such a context becomes the preferred recruiting ground for ready-made leaders of the political mainstream. 4 The heroes in show business traditionally have the responsibility of heroically establishing the supremacy of conventionality and the conventional concept of the good citizen. They project the ultimate paradigm of conformity in a mass culture. Much before Ronald Reagan entered American public life in a big way, M.G. Ramachandran and K. Karunanidhi had become the main contestants for political attention in South India. 5 And it is not surprising that since Ramachandran's death in December 1987, the two women who fought bitterly for his political mantle were both retired film actresses. The leader of the largest opposition party in Parliament then, who was also the chief minister of one of the largest opposition-ruled states, was a retired actor, too. The presence in Parliament of a large number of film stars and the increasingly important roles being played in public life by sports heroes, science managers, media-conscious artists, and other non-political public figures all go into the making of a mass culture of politics and into the growing lability of public opinion in India.

Democracy and Freedom

The culture of Indian politics can be seen as a unique case, or it can be seen as the epitome of the culture of democratic polities the world over. Thanks to the growth of global sensitivities and communications, one can speak of a global democratic community today. Within this community, despite the barriers of individual cultures, certain cross-currents tend to flow and certain kinds of borrowings do take place. For example, the buying and selling of political leaders through the media, under the guidance of whiz kids of modern management, was first perfected in the United States. But it has been pushed to its logical conclusion in India, where the pathway from film studios to charismatic political leadership has now been neatly laid out. Likewise, the use of sports to underwrite national solidarity and as a measure of national performance might have been first tried out successfully in Australia, but it has since found its most vociferous spokespersons in South Asia. It is in this context that I shall re-read the recent experiences of India as a general problem of democratic governance the world over. A certain fear of the people, one suspects, has become the dark underside of every modern state. In the liberal democratic states this fear takes a special form. Each democracy is an act of faith in the sense that each represents, however imperfectly, a commitment to liberal values and a trust in the. political judgement of the people. Yet each is dependent on elaborate institutional arrangements to protect these values from the people. One suspects that behind the act of faith had age-old fears: fear of the gullibility of the people, seen as all too capable of turning into mobs (note the British elite's anxiety after the French Revolution and during the people of expanding franchise); fear of the volatility and the transient, half-baked preferences of the masses (remember the institutional checks against populism devised by archpopulist Charles de Gaulle in France); fear of the emotional vulnerability of the ordinary citizens in international relations, dominated by amoral, conspiratorial powers (Henry Kissinger's fears about nuclear disarmament and the security community's anxiety in Rajiv Gandhi's India); and fear of the people's innocence about and subvertibility to the tinsel glitter of international capitalism (the dominant idiom in India during the radical phase of Indira Gandhi's tenure). Many guesses can be made about the nature of this ambivalence—the mixture of faith and distrust—towards the citizen. It is possible, for

instance, to hazard a guess that the modern state, even when it is avowedly liberal-democratic, does draw a line between democracy and freedom and locate freedom in dispassionate, rational perception of reality and in the optimism of a progressivist theory of history. The commitment to the democratic order becomes then a statement of hope that the populace will ultimately internalize the enlightenment values on which only genuine statecraft can be built and tolerate in the meanwhile the state pursuing these values with a touch of paternalism. In other words, even in an open society, the modern state expects the citizens to prove their commitment to freedom and rationality by accepting and acting according to the meaning of freedom and rationality given to them by the state and by not pushing the state too far towards accepting the diverse versions of freedom and rationality available. The Indian experience is uncommon in that this relationship between democracy and freedom is as yet open. Thanks to the limited reach of modern communications in the country, there are just too many Indians who refuse to be placated by the fact that they have democratic rights: they want to exercise the right to protect or actualize their diverse visions of a free society. Democracy and freedom may still be partly orthogonal in India, but, because one is dealing with a small mass society or cultural melting pot having a vast rural hinterland, such orthogonality remains the feature of a small part of the society. To the majority of Indians, freedom seems inseparable from participatory democracy. While the modern sector in India believes that India will ultimately replicate the West European experience with liberal democracy and walk the pathway from 17th-century renaissance to late 20th-century technocratic capitalism, those outside that sector see the future as open. To them, participatory democracy, rather than spectacular development or advancement in megascience, is the major instrument for ensuring their democratic future. In fact, a part of the growing resistance to the ideas of development and modern science in India derives from the contradiction that has arisen between them and the democratic process. To those who fully vest the idea of freedom in scientific rationality and successful development, this contradiction is a disaster. To those who see around them the collapsing edifice of conventional wisdom, this is a welcome pluralization and politicization of systems of knowledge and modes of social intervention.

Notes 1 . Only a year before the paper was written, a not particularly bright Indian ambassador vetoed the exhibition in the Soviet Union of a new film by the gifted filmmaker G. Aravindan. The film was on the unity and complementarily of the male and the female principles in the cosmos, as reflected in the ardhanarishvara incarnation of Shiva. ‘We are not half-women but full men,’ the ambassador decisively declared. See Sethi (1988). 2 . For instance, see Engineer (1984). For a development of this theme, see Nandy (1988). 3 . See, for example, Bidwai (1986). Also see Kishwar (1987). 4 . The awareness has reached the media. See, for example, Masud (1984), Mohamed (1985), Doctor (1987), and ‘The Man Who Played God—And Won', The Statesman , 17 January 1988. 5 . There is, of course, a difference between the first generation of film personalities in Tamil Nadu politics and the new political media merchants. The former did not use their base in the film world to bypass organized politics; the latter did so. See Hardgrave (1975) for a description of the earlier phase.

References Bidwai, Praful. 1986. ‘Ruling on National Anthem’, The Times of India , 28, 29 August. Doctor, Geeta. 1987. ‘Cinema War Breaks Out’, Sunday Observer , 2 August. Engineer, Asghar Ali. 1984. Bhiwandi-Bombay Riots: Analysis and Documentation. Mumbai: Institute of Islamic Studies. Fromm, Erich. 1955. The Sane Society. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. Hardgrave, Robert. 1975. When Stars Displace the Gods. Austin, Texas: Center for Asian Studies. Jayaswal, K.P. 1943. Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times. Bangalore: Bangalore Printing and Publication Co. Kishwar, Madhu. 1987. ‘A Crisis of Identity’, Illustrated Weekly of India , 8 March. Masud, Iqbal. 1984. ‘Media “Hype”: The Opiate of the Masses’, The Indian Express , 1 January. Mohamed, Khalid. 1985. “Mard” the M.P.’, The Times of India , 1 December. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1988. ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, Alternatives , 13: 174-94. Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1972. The Discovery of India. Mumbai: Vikas Publishing House. Roy, A.K. 1986. ‘Return of Jagjivan Ram’, The Statesman , 28 July. Sethi, Sunil. 1988. ‘T.N. Kaul Scraps Festival Film’, Sunday Mail , 6 March.

* This article was completed in 1988 when the author was at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. DC. The statements and views expressed herein are those of the author, however, and not those of the Center.

4 The Social Character of the Indian State ACHIN VANAIK Broadly speaking, there can be two approaches within Marxism to the problem of the non-neutral class state: that which dissolves state power into class power, and that which refuses to do so. The first approach literally defines away the problem of establishing the class character of the state, but the great merit of this approach is that by having focused attention on the question of how the capitalist state acts to reproduce capitalist relations, it has stimulated the development of concepts which have become indispensable tools for investigating and understanding the class nature of the state. The seminal writings of Nicos Poulantzas, for example, sparked a veritable take-off of Marxist theorization on the state. For post-colonial societies—even in the case of India, where the indigenous bourgeoisie was relatively well-developed—the state has to be seen, as Skocpol has argued, in ‘organizational’ and ‘realist’ terms, as actual organizations with certain interests distinct from those of the dominant classes controlling real peoples and territories (Skocpol 1979a). Hamza Alavi is surely right in his insistence that both the colonial and postcolonial state were overdeveloped and have consequently had to play major roles in the accumulation process and in developing and expanding capitalist production relations, in consolidating, and sometimes even creating from scratch, capitalist ruling classes (Alavi 1972). The substantial and necessary autonomy of the overdeveloped post-colonial state (which must mediate between distinct ruling classes and not just between different fractions of a single ruling class) poses in a particularly sharp way the issue of the Third World ‘intelligentsia’, the ‘state bureaucracy’, or in another formulation of similar vagueness, the ‘middle classes’. This is partly

because the state is manned by members of this middle class, and partly because it pursues many policies which do not meet with the approval or support of the industrial or agrarian bourgeoisies, but apparently become more easily explicable if they are seen as promoting the interests of those who man the state, and who seem to benefit from the extension of the state's role in the economy. In the Indian case, the urban middle class played a major role in the national movement. It provided a disproportionate number of the leaders of the Congress party at all levels. It was the source from which the cadres of the civilian and military bureaucracy were drawn both before and after Independence. Time and again, the question of middle-class incorporation in the ruling coalition has surfaced and resurfaced. One early expression of this was the speculation on how applicable to India was Kalecki's concept of the ‘intermediate regime’. In this regime, the ruling classes were the lower-middle class and the rich peasantry. They organized an appropriate arrangement with the upper-middle class. The state was the dynamic entrepreneur and state capitalism served the interests of the lower-middle class. 1 Surprisingly, this concept enjoyed currency in the early and mid1970s when the strongly capitalist character of the Indian economy, the growing weight of the industrial bourgeoisie, and the unimportance of foreign capital should have become self-evident. Unsurprisingly, the thesis suffered a rapid demise and is now largely ignored or dismissed. But the middle class cannot be treated so cavalierly. Both its huge size in absolute terms and its growing prosperity over time have demanded that it be given close attention. No other capitalist country in the developing world has either a total population or a middle class that is in any way comparable in magnitude. 2 There is not enough recognition of the fact that this demographic uniqueness (the sheer size of the domestic market for even a narrow-based elite-oriented industrialization process) has played a significant role in enabling the Indian economy to pursue an internally oriented path of growth with considerable insulation from the world economy, thus reinforcing the state's autonomy. The state and the middle class would thus seem to have been part of a single dialectic of mutual benefit. Nevertheless, this does not justify attempts to include the middle class in the ruling coalition. Of ail the various terms that have been used to describe the social apex—ruling oligarchy, power bloc, ruling-class alliances,

dominant coalition/ruling coalition—the last would appear to be most appropriate because of the considerable tension among its various components, above all the tension between the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie. ‘Coalition’, rather than ‘bloc’, ‘oligarchy’ or ‘alliance’, better captures the looseness of this arrangement and the pivotal, mediating role that its third component, the apex of the state bureaucracy, has played and continues to play. It is also appropriate to attach to this third component of the dominant coalition the upper echelons of the non-state professional strata, which play a significant ideological-cultural role in civil society, such as senior lawyers and journalists, establishment professors and educationalists, media stars, and so on. Why not then include the ‘middle classes’ as a whole in the dominant coalition or an even broader social category incorporating a larger or smaller segment of the ‘working class’? And how justified is it to argue that the Indian state represents the interests of this ruling (but not governing) coalition of two exploiting classes and a third social group which does not in itself constitute a distinct class in the precise Marxist sense of the term? There is an unresolved problem in the Marxist theory of the state. There is still no way of establishing beyond reasonable doubt or valid criticism the class character of the modern state. An empirical investigation of the social origins and background of senior state personnel, their values and motives, their ideological preferences, can at best give powerful weight to the argument that state managers will be favourably inclined to the dominant classes. Detailed study of the ways in which dominant and dominated classes organize themselves to influence the state apparatuses will confirm the immensely superior access that, for example, business and rich farmers have to the Indian state compared to labour and the poor peasantry, or the ways in which they create obligations through campaign contributions, corruption and favours to senior bureaucrats and politicians. 3 Even an analysis of the content of state policies showing how the specific interests of the dominant classes are regularly served and their class power strengthened cannot be taken as decisive proof of the state's class character. This would be functionalist explanation at its crudest. All these approaches can do is show that the practice of the state displays a consistent and cumulative class bias which renders liberal notions of the neutral state so implausible as to be untenable. But that is a separate issue.

Perhaps the most promising methodological approach—one which can show that class power does ‘determine’ state power—is to specify the filtering, selection and transmission mechanisms through which the exercise of such power governs personnel recruitment and training, the examination and choice of policy options, state revenue sources, decision-making sources, and so on. 4 This needs to be done for different historical periods, so that a dynamic element is introduced into the analysis and it becomes possible to visualize how shifts in the relationship of class forces even within the ruling coalition affect state structures and activities, and through them, the economy. As far as the Indian social formation is concerned, this is still an unexplored research agenda, at both the theoretical and empirical levels. All that can be offered here as a clearly inadequate substitute for this critical task are some observations and generalizations whose plausibility must be measured against similar, broadly Marxist attempts by others to elucidate the nature of the ruling coalition and its relationship to the state.

The Dominant Coalition The most important effort in this direction was undertaken by Pranab Bardhan in his Radhakrishnan Memorial lectures at Oxford University in 1984, subsequently published as The Political Economy of Development in India (Bardhan 1984). This short work (barely 100 pages) set new standards of elegance and terseness of exposition, while retaining an impressive sweep and synthetic appeal. More recently, Ashok Rudra, in an article of much narrower focus, has also sought to present a case for considering the ‘intelligentsia’ a ruling class (Rudra 1989). Bardhan starts off by arguing that the state should be seen as an autonomous actor which, in certain historical cases—for example, Meiji Japan and India—has been far more important in shaping and moulding class power than vice versa. Without explicitly saying so, he seems to be far happier with Skocpol's concepts of ‘potential autonomy' than Miliband's or Poulantzas’ concepts of ‘relative autonomy’ (Skocpol 1979a, 1979b). In the first decades after 1947, the personnel of the state elite in India enjoyed an independent authority and prestige that made them both the main actors in, and principal directors of, the unfolding socio-economic drama of Indian development, though class constraints existed. 5 Over time, however, with the strengthening of the main proprietary classes (the industrial and agrarian

bourgeoisies), the autonomous behaviour of the state became confined more and more to its ‘regulatory’ rather than its ‘developmental’ functions. 6 Bardhan offers convincing factual evidence to support identification of the industrial bourgeoisie (as a whole) as the dominant proprietary class and the principal beneficiary of state policies. This class, under the leadership of the top business houses, supported the government policy of encouraging import substituting industrialization, quantitative trade restrictions providing automatically protected domestic markets, and of running a large public sector providing capital goods, intermediate products and infrastructural facilities for private industry, often at artificially low prices. Since the mid-fifties the government has created several public lending institutions loans from which form the predominant source of private industrial finance…an elaborate scheme of industrial and import licences has been allowed to be turned to the advantage of the industrial and commercial interests they were designed to control. The richer industrialists having better ‘connections’ and better access, have got away with the lion's share in the bureaucratic allocations of the licences thus pre-empting capacity creation and sheltering oligopolistic profits (Bardhan 1984). Even when the big houses created unlicenced capacities they were never punished, but in many cases actually rewarded by subsequent ‘regularization’ of such illegally created capacities. Government financial power through the term-lending institutions (with the right to convert debt into equity) was never really exercised, and real managerial control was left in the hands of private monopoly houses. Instead, the government became a risk-absorber of the last resort, a place for the private sector to dump its sick units. In recent years, the avenues of big business growth have been further cleared. The small-scale industrial sector has not been ignored. It has grown substantially and its linkages, through subcontracting and ancillarization, with the big private-sector companies have become stronger. The number of products whose production was to be reserved exclusively for the smallscale sector grew from forty-six in 1967 to 844 by August 1981. Over 350 products are purchased by the government exclusively from the small-scale sector. The principal socio-political significance of state support for this sector has been its weakening effect on trade unionism, as well as the avenues it provides for upward mobility to members of the urban petty bourgeoisie, and to a lesser extent the rural rich.

The other main proprietary class is the agrarian bourgeoisie or rich-farmer class, which is numerically far more important than the industrial bourgeoisie. Land reforms, like the Zamindari Abolition and Tenancy Acts of the 1950s, helped promote the rise of this class. Its members have been the main beneficiaries (much more so than their more numerous allies, the family-farmers) of government agricultural policies providing institutionalized credit and liberal and subsidized inputs of various kinds (fertilizers, seeds, water, electricity, and so on); they have also benefited from ever-escalating procurement or ‘floor’ prices which have been well above average costs of production since the mid-1960s for wheat, and since the mid-1970s, for rice (Bardhan 1984). If size of landholdings is used as a criterion for classification, then, according to Bardhan, roughly 19 per cent of the rural agricultural population, accounting for 60 per cent of cultivated area and 53 per cent of crop output (in 1975), could be considered as belonging to the rich-farmer category (see Table 4.1 ). 7 A classification based more strictly on labour hiring would probably reduce this class to 14-15 per cent of agricultural households. Bardhan's third proprietary class is made up of the ‘professionals’, by which he appears to mean the public bureaucracy (civilian and military), which he stretches to include public-sector white-collar workers. 8 But to justify calling this a proprietary class, Bardhan is forced to introduce a notion of ‘cultural capital’. The privileged access of this class to education and technical skills is said to give them an extra ‘rent’ income related to scarcity. This they are able to multiply through corruption stemming from their manipulation of a vast array of public controls over private industry and trade. Having introduced the criterion of cultural capital, there is no logical reason why this proprietary class should not be further extended to include the intelligentsia and the professions outside the public sector. This is, in fact, what Rudra does, endorsing the notion of cultural capital, but using as his principal criterion of classification the notion that the third class in the dominant coalition includes all those who do not produce, but nevertheless share in the surplus appropriated and disposed of by the other two proprietary classes, the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisies. Rudra's approach, as Andre Beteille has argued, paves the way for incorporation of even public-sector manual workers in the third ‘ruling class’. 9

Table 4.1: Distribution of Farm Income by Land Size Classes in 1975 (as per cent of farm households)

Bardhan, in making a case for his ‘professionals’ to be considered part of the dominant coalition, focuses entirely on the professionals of the public bureaucracy. This clearly stems from the importance he attaches to the physical occupancy of positions in the state structures, both in the central services and in the states. It is this that is supposed to give them the class power which they are then able to turn to their benefit. Indeed, his efforts at substantiating his hypothesis rely on the ‘benefit’ argument, for example, citing evidence of the rising real incomes of government employees and their assured employment. 10 The fact of rising middle-class prosperity, of this group's vested interest in maintaining this prosperity, or even of the state's constant concern to succour this stratum can by no means clinch the issue. The urban petty bourgeoisie constitute the crucial mass social base for the industrial bourgeoisie, and a vital part of the economic base and market for both the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisies. The very pattern of capitalist development and industrialization pursued and promoted by the Indian state was geared to meeting the needs (actual and fostered) of a minority of the total population. There is no mystery, therefore, about its rising incomes. If on the supply side the Indian state has had to promote and develop a class of producers-owners, and even involve itself directly in production, it has also had to promote and develop on the demand side a broadening social category of reasonably well-off consumers, thus creating minimum conditions for an internal dynamic of growth. But can or should the class and social power of ‘producers’ (in the bourgeois sense) and consumers be approximated, let alone equated? What class power do these professionals enjoy and how do they exercise it? How do they influence state decision making with respect to the whole

gamut of domestic preoccupations—from industry to agriculture to commerce to state expenditure in non-developmental areas? Their interests appear to be more linked to the expansion and consolidation of educational and administrative functions, and presumably to further nationalization than to technological, agricultural or industrial progress. This class as a whole has no unifying interests apart from wanting to increase its incomes, preserve employment, and extend job prospects. 11 According to Bardhan, in the principal conflict within the dominant coalition, the public-sector professionals line up with the industrial bourgeoisie against the rich farmer. Furthermore, he argues that there is a secondary conflict between these professionals and the industrial bourgeoisie which is focused on the licence-permit-quota Raj, the system of government controls over private-sector investment and production. The tension between the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisies has focused on the issue of terms of trade between agriculture and industry. The evidence available on this issue is not conclusive, since the choice of base year for measurement can lead to substantial variation of outcomes. There is some agreement, however, that net barter terms of trade, having been roughly stable till the mid-1960s, then moving against industry till the mid1970s, began to shift against agriculture, even if the net income terms of trade have not shifted in the same way. Disaggregation of agricultural products into consumption or wage goods (mainly food) and into raw materials (agro-inputs into industry) and of industrial products into consumption goods and industrial inputs into agriculture, suggest that where farmers have really lost out (though by how much is not clear) is as buyers of both industrial inputs and consumption goods and as sellers of raw materials, rather than as sellers of wage goods. The biggest beneficiaries have been the urban producers, both on the output and input side. Urban consumers have benefited from state subsidization of foodgrains, which have kept prices lower than they otherwise would have been. But is this the result of pressure from public-sector professionals or of the state elite's desire to restrain urban inflation in order to maintain social and political stability, and to its general sensitivity to the urban constituency as a whole, the ‘middle class’, whether employed in the public sector or not? There is simply no justification for seeing this policy as a specific response to some presumed pressure of the public-sector professionals. The policy of

food subsidization is a long-standing one, and was never initiated as a simple response to the needs of the professional class. Their attitude to what the rich-farmer lobby calls the rural versus urban (or Bharat versus India) conflict has been one of indifference. It is the agrarian bourgeoisie which has every interest in drawing the battle lines along an exaggerated city versus countryside divide, both because it benefits most from government, attempts to ‘rectify’ the terms of trade (or at least prevent them from getting significantly worse), and because this is the best way for it to secure the necessary cross-class and cross-sectional mobilization in the countryside that is vital to its political and social strength. The rich-farmer lobby wants to win over a maximum of the family-farmers and neutralize a minimum of the poor peasantry and the landless. Anything more is a bonus. The secondary conflict between the professionals and the industrial bourgeoisie postulated by Bardhan and others assumes that this ‘class’ as a whole benefits through corruption and other private favours from a regime of state controls. This is broadly correct. Corruption has been sufficiently institutionalized in government administration and in the nationalized financial and industrial units that it flows down to even manual and bluecollar employees—so why not include them? But the crucial point is that responsibility for institutionalized corruption lies at the upper layers of the administrative hierarchy. Those lower down may be silent if willing partners in preserving a system of controls, but they possess no leverage in deciding whether this system is to be continued, deepened or weakened. It is the state elite that has the power to take decisions on this as on the whole range of industrial, agricultural and other policies. This state elite, which can be further subdivided into its political and bureaucratic components, is not susceptible to pressure from below, which is in any case negligible with regard to general issues of sectoral or national interest. Its horizontal linkages to the dominant classes outside the state apparatuses but within the ruling coalition are incomparably more important than any downward linkages it has to lower-level state employees. Bardhan is not unaware of the great disparity in power between the upper and lower ranks of this professional class. He calls the former the state elite, but confines it rather too narrowly to the political leadership when it should include the upper echelons of the permanent civilian and military bureaucracy. The latter do not merely implement decisions taken by the former, as he seems to imply, but play a crucial role in determining the

range of options examined and influencing final choices. The apex of the state bureaucracy can be said to include both the political and the nonpolitical appointees in the state apparatuses. As for including white-collar workers in the public bureaucracy—that is, those below the non-unionized managerial cadre—their power to block implementation is limited and rarely exercised. The central argument for nevertheless including them as members of the proprietary class ignores critical questions. What proportion of ‘class’ power do they wield? Is this proportion significant? The argument rests on the fact that they share in the multiplication of incomes arising from disbursements by the main beneficiaries of the decisions that are implemented. The ‘neta-babu [leader-clerk] class’ is neither a class nor is its magnitude anywhere near the figure of sixteen million that was once calculated by Prof. Raj Krishna. 12 Had this really been the case, there would be no adequate explanation for the ease with which the post-1980 Mrs Gandhi government and the Rajiv government endorsed and carried out programmes of liberalization. In fact, there was a broad consensus within the apex of the state bureaucracy as well as among the ideologists outside government (senior journalists, professional economists, and so on) in favour of both liberalization and a reduction in the economic role of the state. No ideological battle on this was ever really joined, because there was no underlying material conflict between professionals and the industrial bourgeoisie. If the liberalization programme was implemented cautiously (till 1991), this was not because of subterranean resistance from a bureaucratic class, stretching down to unionized white-collar workers, responding to threats to their livelihood from the erosion of a bloated system of administrative controls, but because significant sections of the state elite along with important sections of the industrial bourgeoisie were themselves concerned that liberalization should not proceed too far too fast. After 1991, with the implementation of the new economic policy, the pace of liberalization escalated dramatically, and would do so precisely because there was no such material conflict. Conflicts within the dominant coalition should, in theory, be refracted in struggles within the state apparatuses, and as such should leave significant traces on state policies and in particular the state budget, its principal financial mechanism for reproducing itself and expanding its power. The fiscal crisis of the state is thus always a social crisis, and Bardhan is fully

justified in seeking evidence of intra-coalition conflicts through a disaggregated analysis of the state budget and the factors behind the government's growing fiscal deficit. But this must always be done with due care. When it is not possible to specify the particular mediations through which a particular class has succeeded in securing a greater allocation of resources for itself, it is necessary to be doubly cautious. The fact that state expenditure on public administration and defence has progressively risen does not necessarily mean (nor even plausibly suggest) that a bureaucratic class exists or that it is part of the dominant coalition. Many analysts have made much of the higher-than-average growth rates of expenditure in this area. Patnaik has also emphasized this, though with the economic rather than sociological intention of showing that Indian growth has been too strongly skewed towards the services sector and fuelled to a great extent by non-plan expenditures (Patnaik 1987; Chandrasekhar 1989). The budget deficit has been growing steadily. The main expenditure is on defence, public debt interest payments, and subsidies on food and fertilizers. Subsidies have grown fastest, at over 40 per cent per annum over the last few years. Tax collection is inelastic. There is no question of taxing rural wealth or incomes. In keeping with its policy of encouraging corporate private-sector growth and pleasing the urban middle-class consumer, direct taxes as a proportion of total revenue collection have been declining. Indirect taxes bear a heavy burden. The overall result has been a growing fiscal gap covered by deficit financing and market borrowings. Behind this fiscal crisis lies government pandering to the industrial bourgeoisie, the rural rich, the urban middle-class consumer and the defence establishment. Where then does the ‘bureaucratic class’ come into the picture, specially when the orientation of the present government is to cut budgetary support to the public sector and generally reduce its role in the economy? The ‘professionals’ cannot be held responsible for the importance given to defence. The continued allocation of significant resources to defence is not a function of the pressure of the ‘public bureaucracy’ as a whole, let alone Rudra's ‘intelligentsia’, but of the general vision of the future held by the state elite (which includes the top echelons of the defence services) and its larger political and military ambitions. Revealingly, defence expenditure remains something of a sacred cow, subject to only the faintest and most occasional criticism.

As for the progressive increase in value added in public administration and defence, a recent study shows this to have been significantly overestimated, as also for the services sector as a whole. Original estimates showed value added (for public administration and defence) in the 1960s and 1970s to be 7.9 per cent per annum, rising to 12.1 per cent per annum in the 1980s (up to 1985-86). Revised estimates following a different and more accurate method of computation show value added in the 1980s at 6.5 per cent per annum. Transport, banking and insurance have shown growth rates in value added significantly higher than administration and defence, and communications has shown comparable rates of growth in the 1980s. The services sector is now believed to have grown at 5.7 per cent per annum in the 1980s, instead of the earlier 7.4 per cent per annum computation. 13 The growth acceleration in the primary and secondary sectors in the 1980s has been sharper than in services. The service subsectors most closely connected to the commodity-producing sectors have had relatively faster growth. Given that state autonomy is greatest in the sphere of allocation rather than production, why, if the ‘bureaucratic class’ exists, did it not do better for itself in the 1980s? Political elite must be distinguished from bureaucratic elite at both the central and state levels. Bureaucratic elite at the centre are far less susceptible to the pressure of the agrarian bourgeoisie than their counterparts in the states, or the political elite at both the centre and the states. In the states, the more localized the bureaucracy, the more subordinated it is to the power of the rural rich. The industrial bourgeoisie clearly exercises greater authority on the bureaucracy at the centre, and a reasonable counterweight on the bureaucracy in the regional metropolises. The political elite at the centre and in the states suffer the strongest of dual pressures from both the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisies. These elite, constituting the apex of the bureaucracy with all its internal factionalism, are the crucial forums within the state where the intra-coalition conflicts are fought out. Detailed study of these elite, their factions, their relationships to the numerous class organizations and to the movements of the rural and urban bourgeoisie, are likely to provide important clues about the transmission and selection mechanisms that link class power and state power. Democratic politics favours the agrarian bourgeoisie, whose powers of popular mobilization cannot be matched by its industrial counterpart.

Against this, the very logic of capitalist development ensures that the industrial bourgeoisie will remain the strongest class even as the social and political challenge of the rich farmer grows. Capitalist development means progressive industrialization. There is no getting away from this. The needs of industry and the service sector become more important. Their relative weight grows. Expanded reproduction becomes their expanded reproduction. The government's turn to liberalization had everything to do with Indian industry and very little to do with agriculture. At the same time, it must be remembered that the increased attention paid to agriculture from the Third Plan onwards did reflect the growing importance of the agrarian bourgeoisie. But the dominant coalition need not be a permanent fixture. For all the sharpness of the present conflict between agrarian and industrial bourgeoisies, it remains a struggle about the terms of accommodation within the ‘first’, prospering India, as distinct from a ‘second’, where tragic levels of backwardness and poverty persist. The dominant coalition could give way in time to a more conventional ruling-class alliance or even a bloc. After all, by the year 2000, the agricultural sector might at best contribute only a quarter of total output, though the rural and peasant population will remain large both absolutely and relatively. The struggle of the agrarian bourgeoisie exists in two phases. At present, the rich farmer must secure assurances that the state will do everything it can to give itself secure and growing surpluses. But it is the second phase that is decisive for this bourgeoisie's future. The capitalist farmer-family must be able to make the transition to becoming the farmer capitalist-family. This is not just a question of progressive industrialization and commercialization of agricultural production and marketing. It is above all a question of the rich farmer-family having sufficient scope to invest its surpluses in industry and trade, to traverse the worlds of town and country with near-equal facility, confidence and profitability. These phases are not distinctly demarcated in either time or space. For many a rich farmer-family in Punjab, the transition has already been made, while for many more the inability to invest accumulating surpluses in a productive manner is a growing frustration which has not a little to do with Punjab's social and political crises. If in the medium term the state aims mainly to manage this basic conflict within the dominant coalition, its more fundamental challenge is to resolve it.

The sheer size of this agrarian bourgeoisie, the weaknesses of the tendencies towards social polarization in rural areas, the absence of any process of cumulative land consolidation, the limited time span available, all combine to make this task of class integration an endeavour without historical precedent or parallel. 14 If such a process gathers adequate momentum, it will ultimately reflect itself in a shift or extension of agrarian demands. In the 1950s and 1960s, the central issues were land reform (this much but no further), compulsory procurement of foodgrains and the Damocles sword of taxation on agricultural property and incomes. The pressure then was directed primarily at state governments. From the late 1960s onwards, the main issues have been output and input prices and cost subsidies, with the pressure directed mainly at the centre. The state governments remain the foci of agrarian mobilization, not only on such issues as debt cancellation, but also because they are seen as important avenues for pressurizing the centre on issues where the latter has final decision-making powers.

What About Foreign Capitalists? * Till 1991 and the initiation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) by the Narasimha Rao Congress government elected in that year, India had one of the more insulated economies in the Third World. The NEP is best summed up as a long-term ‘solution’ to a short-term crisis! By 1991, the balance of payments situation had reached such a crisis point (foreign exchange reserves could barely pay for two months’ imports) that obtaining covering loans for necessary imports had become unavoidable. This balance of payments deficit and associated fiscal deficits had themselves been caused by the irresponsible manner in which the economy had been liberalized in the latter half of the 1980s. It was caused by a combination of factors— greater import liberalization but relatively inadequate growth in exports, reluctance to raise domestic resources through higher direct taxes coupled with higher and laxer borrowing, and rising public expenditure of an unproductive type. Between 1980-81 and 1990-91, interest paid by the government on its debt rose from 10 per cent of total central government expenditure to 19 per cent. External debt, excluding short-term debt (maturing within a year) and defence debt (a secret), rose from $23.8 billion

in 1980-81 to $62.3 billion by 1990-91. The debt service burden rose from 15 per cent of export earnings to 30 per cent in the same period. 15 To tide over the short-term macro-imbalance, the government secured standby arrangement facilities from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and, as a corollary, a loan from the World Bank (WB). These loans came with strings attached, namely, acceptance of a standard IMF/WB policy package called the Stabilization and Structural Adjustment Programme (SSAP). This package initiated a dramatic acceleration of the liberalization process which had proceeded throughout the 1980s, but in a more cautious and careful manner. The space that was now being offered to foreign capital was much greater and the flow of such capital into India was also greatly accelerated, even if still limited in comparison to the amounts flowing into other Asian countries like China or the East Asian Tigers. It is currently still less even than what is going into Sri Lanka. If private foreign investment into India in 1986-87 was $208 million, and below $500 million in 199091, it has reached over $2 billion by 1996-97. This has greatly exceeded earlier forecasts made before the advent of the NEP. From the point of view of characterizing the Indian state, what did the NEP and this new influx of foreign capital imply? Had the character of the Indian state somehow been transformed from what it had been for decades earlier during which the dominant coalition had little place for the representatives of foreign capital? The arrival of the NEP, far from implying that a dramatic change had taken place in the social character of the Indian state, or that foreign capitalists had long been exercising a hidden influence on the state which had now suddenly surfaced, actually confirmed the decisive role played in the dominant coalition by the apex of the bureaucracy! The NEP, certainly in its scale and depth, came as a surprise not only to the Indian industrial bourgeoisie, but to the governments of the advanced capitalist countries and to foreign capital. All broadly welcomed it. Now was the Indian state in such a parlous condition or so much in hock to the IMF/WB that it had to accept the SSAP? The apex of the Indian bureaucracy chose to do so. The fact that it could so decide to embark on the NEP, and do so with so little internal resistance, confirmed how weak were all those theories which assigned such great weight to the bureaucracy as a whole (from its lower to its upper echelons) as a basic class or social anchor for the preservation of a licence-permit Raj.

The ideological orientation or shift within the apex of the bureaucracy was the decisive factor. Not only had neo-liberal economic thinking (which the SSAP embodied) come to dominate elite views over the 1980s in the Anglo-American world, and, therefore, in the IMF/WB where over 80 per cent of all economists come from Anglo-American universities. But the collapse of the former USSR and the adoption by its successor countries and by the countries of Eastern Europe of neo-liberal policies to guide their transition towards capitalism, clearly had a profound ideological effect worldwide. The industrial bourgeoisie in India welcomed the general thrust of the NEP, although some sections were subsequently to have reservations about those aspects deemed to overly favour foreign capital at the expense of domestic. This endorsement indicated broad agreement within the bourgeoisie that all sections, from large to small, would now have to look for self-enhancement through collaboration with foreign capital, even in order to compete better at home, let alone abroad. Such a development is not properly characterized as the emergence or reemergence of significant strata of comprador bourgeoisie at odds with more nationalist sections of the industrial bourgeoisie. It is better understood as the emergence of an ‘internal bourgeoisie’ looking to benefit from connection with foreign capital in a more flexible range of associations than in the past, where outright dependence was considered the only or main option. 16 However, as the economy continues to open up (and specially after there is full convertibility on capital account), the social character of the Indian state, i.e., the precise composition of and relative weightage of constituents within its dominant coalition, may well undergo rapid change. One direction of likely reassessment of the nature of this coalition will be in regard to assigning relative weight in this coalition to the industrial and agrarian wings of the Indian bourgeoisie. This is more than what has been discussed earlier, namely, the declining relative weight of the agricultural sector in overall economic production. A more open or ‘globalized’ Indian economy will lead to greater differentiation within the agrarian bourgeoisie itself, with a newer and growing section of agriculture-based entrepreneurs and capitalists becoming much more outward- than inward-oriented, i.e., producing primarily for the world or outside market(s) rather than for the domestic market. This development can only weaken the strength of the agrarian bourgeoisie as a whole relative to the industrial bourgeoisie. Although the latter will also experience greater differentiation along the

internal-external axis, this will not be in any nearly so sharp or dichotomous way as is likely to take place in the agricultural sector. Already there has emerged, in contrast to the 1980s when the demand for higher prices for output united virtually all sections of the agrarian bourgeoisie, a significantly differentiated response to such matters as the NEP, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), intellectual property rights, patent laws, etc. Where the farmers’ movement led by Sharad Joshi in the west supports the new orientation, those led by Mahinder Singh Tikait and Nanjundaswamy in the north and south respectively, have been much more critical and opposed to it. The other direction in which reassessment of the precise character of the Indian state may have to move is in regard to the question of how much weight within the dominant coalition should now be given to foreign capital and its representatives. This foreign capital is not homogeneous in its sources. It comes from a number of areas from Japan to the USA to wealthy Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). There is, thus, less point in stipulating excessive influence on the Indian economy and state to the capitalists of any particular country. Indeed, as a collective group, they may not be able to wield as much influence as domestic capitalists. If in this sense the ‘Indian’ character of the state remains, this may also count for much less than in the past, not only because the content of this ‘Indianness’ (besides a formal nationalist affiliation) has become so much weaker, but because continuing ‘globalization’ specially in the financial sector, also means that external factors can exercise decisive influence on the general pattern and direction of the Indian economy. There would seem then, to be two possible routes that the Indian economy and state can take in the coming period. Either it will move along the route of the East Asian or Chinese economies in which the bureaucratic apex will continue to have a decisive ‘shaping’ and coordinating role in the economic system, despite the undeniable fact that a new and larger space has been created in the dominant coalition for occupation by foreign capital. Or India will take the route of greatly reducing the role that a bureaucratic apex can play. Here, instead of simply an extra or expanding space being created for occupancy by foreign capital, there will be more of a zero-sum situation. That space within the dominant coalition that is gained by foreign capital will be substantially what is lost by the bureaucratic apex and by sections of the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie.

This would represent the emergence of a new kind of dependent capitalism in India, and a change in the precise social characterization of the Indian state as compared to what it has been in earlier decades. This would not be a situation best characterized through labels like ‘neocolonialism’ or ‘semi-colonialism' in which the Indian bourgeoisie is simply seen as subordinated to foreign capital, or where foreign capital alone is seen as playing the decisive hegemonic role within the ruling-class alliance or coalition. Rather, it would be a situation in which sizeable sections of the Indian bourgeoisie are themselves part of a more mobile bloc of transnational capital playing the decisive hegemonic role within the rulingclass coalition or alliance that dominates the Indian state.

Notes 1 . According to Kalecki (1972), where the national bourgeoisie was weak, an intermediate regime could be established. Such a regime would be characterized by unimpressive agricultural growth and inflation, while foreign credits would be of great importance. Without strong external pressure from foreign capital for the restoration of ‘normal’ capitalist rule by big business (and imperialism behind it), the intermediate regime could enjoy remarkable stability. 2 . If the top two deciles (or approximately 190 million people) are taken as the effective market for industrialization, then apart from China, the total populations of only two countries exceed it—Indonesia (barely), and the USA. 3 . For industrial capital's superior and regular (if behind-the-scenes) access to government, and its efforts to get its way, see Kochanek (1974). According to Kochanek, business is the best-organized interest group in the country, and the only one with day-today contact with government. 4 . The various writings of Claus Offe during the 1970s in the Marxist theoretical journal Kapitalistate , and his more recent works like Contradictions in the Welfare State (1984) have been particularly important. Also see O'Connor (1973). 5 . ‘The state elite that inherited the power at the time of Independence enjoyed enormous prestige and a sufficiently unified sense of ideological purpose about the desirability of using state intervention to promote national economic development; it redirected and restructured the economy, and in the process exerted great pressure on the proprietary classes. This led to considerable complexity and fluidity in the composition of the proprietary classes and their relationship with the state’ (Bardhan 1984). How relative then was the ‘relative autonomy’ of the Indian state at Independence? Or how possible was it for the Indian state to exercise its ‘political autonomy’? When a sizeable bourgeois class exists, as it did at the time of Independence, then the pursuit of any genuine socialist alternative necessarily means the expropriation and economic decimation of this bourgeois class. There is no halfway ‘mixed economy’ house of ‘Indian socialism’ or ‘Third World socials’. When the state refuses to consider, let alone carry out such an expropriation, then the option of pursuing genuine socialism is

foreclosed. This is not to say that the task of political expropriation of the bourgeoisie and its economic expropriation have to be synchronized. But the first has to take place and invariably involves a revolutionary dismantling of the previous state structure. While much has been made of the post-Independence autonomy of the Indian state from the dominant classes, the Congress played an exceptionally important role in anchoring and stabilizing the Indian state. Given the class supports of the Congress, its history of multi-class mobilization and cross-class collaboration, the political and social perspectives of its leadership explicitly ruled out before 1947 any possibility of revolutionary destruction of the colonial state (as in Vietnam), or economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie thereafter. If only by default, it could go nowhere else but along the path of capitalist development. Once the capitalist class is allowed to exist, it imposes two basic constraints on the economy: class control of land, and private investment in industry. Both must be decisively undermined, and not just ‘relativized’ by the growth of state capital, if a fundamentally non-capitalist pattern of economic development is to emerge. 6 . C. Offe called it the state's elective and productive policies respectively. 7 . Bardhan's cut-off is 4.05 hectares or roughly ten acres. L.J. and S.H. Rudolph (1987), make fifteen acres their cut-off point (see their Table 40, p. 336), thereby expanding the size of their ‘bullock capitalist’ or family-farmer category. According to the 1971 Census, the average size of holdings above ten acres was close to twenty-four acres (see ibid.: Table B-3, p. 410). Ten acres seems a reasonable cut-off point, because most farmers holding between ten and fifteen acres can safely be assumed to be accumulating surpluses in most years, using more mechanized inputs and reducing their own labour to more supervisory functions. Also, better-off farmers are more likely to hide their true wealth from data collectors, so the size of this class is almost certainly underestimated and that of the ‘middle’ peasantry overestimated, though the discrepancy may not be more than a few percentage points. 8 . Bardhan has since clarified that he refers to the same social category as does Rudra, both inside and outside the bureaucracy. But he is uneasy with the term ‘intelligentsia’ (Bardhan 1989: 155). 9 . See Béteille (1989). Rudra's approach is more Weberian than Marxist, though he tries to centre his taxonomy on the concept of contradiction. Marx did not get around to presenting his final definitive explanation of class as promised in vol. Ill of Capital. But Geoffrey de Ste Croix (1981: 43-44, 1984) is surely right in arguing that the overwhelming weight of evidence in Marx's writings clearly points to the centrality of the concept of exploitation and not merely contradiction in his concept of class, that is, the appropriation and disposition of the fruits of surplus labour. This exploitation can be direct and individual or indirect and collective (for example, state taxation), but it must be present if classes are to be defined at either end of the relation in properly Marxist terms. Social groups which do not fit easily—namely, the modern middle class or the peasantry—obviously create extremely difficult problems of classification. They can be forced into one existing class or the other, theorized in non-Marxist terms as a new class (which is what Rudra does), or allowed to exist in their complexity as ‘contradictory locations within exploitation relations’, which is what Erik O. Wright (1985) has argued for, and which is probably the best solution available at the moment. It then remains to

evaluate the ‘objective’ or ‘fundamental’ long-term ‘interest’ of the occupants of these contradictory locations through a concrete investigation of their specific circumstances. What is wrong with Rudra's approach is not that it is non-Marxist, but that by forcing this broad social group with its many differentiations into the mould of a single class, and, furthermore, pushing it into the ruling coalition as itself a ‘ruling class’, he grossly and misleadingly simplifies reality and greatly confuses the political task of class and social differentiation. This differentiation is ultimately undertaken not as an academic exercise, but with the purpose of identifying those classes and social groups and alliances which have the deepest interests in fighting for radical change whatever the level of their objective awareness, which can change quite dramatically. Marx recognized the complexity of the middle stratum and thereby termed it a ‘vacillating class’, that is, one site of the fight for hegemony. Moreover, this stratum could not by virtue of its inherent vacillation be the leader in social transformation. Rudra accepts that his intelligentsia is indeed a vacillating class which in part or whole can swing to the side of revolution. For this very reason, he insists that it has had to be incorporated in the dominant coalition. In short, you have a ruling class which plays the pivotal role in sustaining exploitative class rule, but which has no inflexible interest in the permanent preservation of capitalism. Where the other two classes are part of the ruling coalition because of their non-vacillating commitment to preserving exploitation, the intelligentsia is there because of its vacillation. It has not only been co-opted, it has also become the leader. At bottom, Rudra's analysis is the logical consequence of a trajectory which assigns less and less importance to classical Marxist perspectives concerning the central role of the working class. The intellectual has become the prime mover of history in India. 10 . The professionals should presumably have a vested interest in maintaining their scarcity value, by preventing the spread of education , particularly higher education. There are many reasons for the dismal failure of literacy to expand fast enough and for the problems the Indian education system faces. But it is very difficult to see in this the result of a collective and conscious ‘middle-class conspiracy'. It could be more plausibly argued that middle-class pressure has led to an improperly planned expansion of higher education; this has devalued degrees even as it has raised degree requirements for the lower levels of middle-class occupations, and thus promoted the semi-proletarianization of sections of the educated middle classes. Between 1960-61 and 1984-85, the real incomes of public-sector workers more than doubled while the real incomes of workers in the organized private sector rose by 60 per cent. What conclusions can plausibly be drawn from this? That public-sector workers are part of the dominant coalition? Or that the state's role as model employer (from which it now wishes to withdraw), the degree and scale (often national) of unionization, and the strategic importance of public-sector industries and nationalized services in the overall economy, all combine to give these workers a class strength and potential (their strike action being far more dislocating in its effects than similar action in the private sector) which, unsurprisingly, is reflected in higher growth of real incomes? 11 . The annual rate of absorption in the public sector taken as a whole has shown a steady decline from 3.4 per cent in 1971 to 2.4 per cent in 1986. While the trend in central- and state-government sectors, though declining overall, has tended to fluctuate from one year to the next, the decline had been sharpest and with least fluctuation in the quasi-

government sector, which includes the public-sector industries. The rate of growth of this so-called bureaucratic class is barely keeping pace with the rate of growth of the labour force as a whole. With pressures for cutting down the role of the state in the economy growing, it is extremely unlikely that this trend will be reversed. See Statistical Outline of India: 1988-1989 (1988: 135). 12 . The late Prof. Raj Krishna, a member of the Planning Commission under Janata rule, was one of the earliest advocates of liberalization as a way of undermining the ‘netababu class', which he identified as the major social force blocking such economic rationalization. See Krishna (1989). 13 . Ahluwalia (1989) has suggested after her examination of earlier methodology that pre1980s figures (for which there are no revised estimates) were almost certainly overestimates, while the revised figures may tend to underestimate the true figure. But she suggests that there is no justification for assuming a marked acceleration in expenditure over the last decade. 14 . Thorner's (1980) ‘steel-grey revolution'—as distinct from the much-touted Green Revolution—was a reference to this process of transition. But the kind of off-farm activities controlled by kulaks that he was describing—tea shops, brick kilns, flour mills, etc., even sugar production through cooperatives—are only the earliest stages. Ameliorating and then eliminating the tension between agrarian and industrial bourgeoisies requires much more. Most such activities are too narrowly confined to and dependent upon rural prosperity and incomes. The aspiring farmer capitalist-family must be able to enter fields of production where agro-raw materials constitute a lesser and lesser proportion of total value added in production. That is, there should emerge a closer and closer integration of the farmer capitalist-family in the (lengthening) chain of industrial production. R. Sau (1988) is among the few leftists who have stressed the importance of this transition for the future political economic of India. He is frankly sceptical that there can be a successful transition. More recently, Bardhan has suggested that the inter-coalition tension between urban and rural bourgeoisie might well decline (Bardhan 1989). It is in Punjab, the most advanced kulak state, that there has been a foretaste of the kind of demands that could be raised on a larger scale in the future. The Akali Dal, the class party of the Jat peasantry, specially its richest layer, has time and again, even when out of office, stressed the importance of further industrialization of Punjab. The demand here is for public sector heavy industry which could then create sufficient backward and forward linkages for smaller-scale investments absorbing farmer surpluses. There is, of course, a communal aspect in that, at present, urban industry and trade in Punjab are dominated by Hindus, and opportunities for aspiring Sikh entrepreneurs from both urban and rural areas are felt to be blocked. 15 . See A. Bhadury and D. Nayyar (1996: Ch. 2). By mid-1997, the long-term external debt of India was around $100 billion. 16 . The term ‘internal bourgeoisie’ was coined by Nicos Poulantzas (1975) in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. Whatever one's misgivings about the precise appropriateness of this particular formulation, this was an important conceptual attempt by Poulantzas to grasp what was new about the neo-imperialism of ‘late capitalism’ as it affected the Third World.

References Ahluwalia, I.J. 1989. ‘The Services Sector: An Analysis’, The Economic Times , 11, 12 January. Alavi, H. 1972. ‘The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh’, New Left Review , 74, July-August: 59-82. Bardhan, P. 1984. The Political Economy of Development in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989. ‘The Dominant Class’, Economic and Political Weekly , 24 (3), 21 January: 155-56. Béteille. A. 1989. ‘Are the Intelligentsia a Ruling Class?’, Economic and Political Weekly , 24(3), 21 January: 151-55. Bhadury, A. and D. Nayyar. 1996. The Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalisation. New Delhi: Penguin. Chandrasekhar, C.P. 1989. ‘Aspects of Growth and Structural Change in Indian Industry’, Economic and Political Weekly , Annual No., Spring. Kalecki, M. 1972. ‘Social and Economic Aspects of Intermediate Regimes’, in M. Kalecki, Socialism and the Mixed Economy: Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kochanek, S.A. 1974. Business and Politics in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Krishna, Raj. 1989. ‘Economic Outlook for India’, in J. Roach (ed.), India 2000: The Next Fifteen Years. Riverdale Press. O'Connor, James. 1973. The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin's Press. Offe, Claus. 1984. Contradictions of the Welfare State. London: Hutchinson & Co. Patnaik, P. 1987. ‘Recent Growth Experience of the Indian Economy’, Economic and Political Weekly , 22 (19, 20 and 21), Annual No., May: 49-56. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1975. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: Verso. Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Mumbai: Orient Longman. Rudra, A. 1989. ‘Emergence of the Intelligentsia as a Ruling Class in India’, Economic and Political Weekly , 24 (3), 21 January: 142-50. Sau, R. 1988. ‘A Theory of Underdeveloped Capitalism: ‘The Case of India’, Economic and Political Weekly , 23 (35), 27 August: 1797-803. Skocpol, T. 1979a. ‘State and Revolution: Old Regimes and Revolutionary Crisis’, Theory and Society , 1 (1 and 2), January-March: 7-96. ———. 1979b. States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Statistical Outline of India: 1988-1989. June 1988. Mumbai: Tata Press. de Ste Croix, Geoffrey. 1981. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. London: Duckworth. ———. 1984. ‘Class in Marx's Conception of History, Ancient and Modern’, New Left Review , July–August. Thorner, D. 1980. The Shaping of Modern India. Mumbai: Allied Publishers.

Wright, Erik O. 1985. Classes. London: Verso.

  ‘This portion is an update added subsequent to the publication of The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India in 1990 from which the earlier portions have been extracted.

PART II

5 Development Planning and the Indian State PARTHA CHATTERJEE 1 Although it is a virtual truism that the state is the central actor in any programme for planned economic development, its role in planning is not for that reason any less problematical. What does it mean to say that ‘the state’ acts? Does it act on one's own? Do others act through it? Whom does it act upon? On other entities outside the state? Or does it act upon itself? To talk about the state as an ‘actor’ is to endow it with a will; to say that it acts according to coherent and rational principles of choice is further to endow it with a consciousness. How are these will and consciousness produced? These are not, one would presumably agree, questions with which the economic literature on planning has concerned itself. For the most part, that literature has taken what it calls ‘socio-political conditions’ as parametric for its exercise. What the state thinks as politically necessary or feasible is ‘given’ to the planner: it is determined by a process of politics that is extraneous to the planning exercise per se. The task of the planner is to work out the consistencies between different objectives, weigh the costs and benefits of different alternatives, and suggest an efficient or optimal mix of strategies. Planning, many would say, is an exercise in instrumental rationality. And yet, it is curious that when debates about planning have led to fundamental disagreements within the discipline, economists have not managed to hold themselves back from arguing about the relative priorities among ‘socio-political’ objectives or about their political feasibility, and have defended or attacked particular planning strategies by appealing to considerations that are presumably external to their practice.

As someone whose professional preoccupation is to marvel at the ways in which logic becomes perpetually implicated in rhetoric, and knowledge in power, I am not surprised by this transgression of avowed disciplinary boundaries. My own practice within my happily ill-defined discipline has taught me (notwithstanding the fact that some of my colleagues still go on pretending that they can usefully do for politics what the economists have done for the economy: may they remain at peace with their intellects!) that not only are instruments chosen according to goals that are desired, but goals themselves are very often fixed because certain instruments have to be used. Indeed, instruments in politics can become goals in themselves, just as the very declaration of an objective can become an instrument for something else. The once-fashionable debate about the separability of means and ends was, as far as I can understand it, only another way of establishing their unity. To me, then, the interesting question is not whether the idea of a domain of instrumental rationality clearly demarcated from the disorderly terrain of political squabble can be logically sustained. Rather, the interesting question is how this very assertion of a technical discipline of planning can become an instrument of politics, i.e., of the exercise and contestation of power. I will address my question directly to the experience of Indian planning. But in order to do that, let me begin with a bit of history.

Planning for Planning 2 In August 1937, the Congress Working Committee at its meeting in Wardha adopted a resolution recommending to the Congress Ministries the appointment of a Committee of experts to consider urgent and vital problems the solution of which is necessary to any scheme of national reconstruction and social planning. Such solution will require extensive survey and the collection of data, as well as a clearly defined social objective.

The immediate background of this resolution was the formation by the Congress, under the new constitutional arrangements, of ministries in six (later eight) provinces of India and the questions raised, specially by the Gandhians (including Gandhi himself) about the responsibility of the Congress in regulating (more precisely, restricting) the growth of modern industries. The left within the Congress, including its two stalwarts, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, sought to put aside this

nagging ideological debate by arguing that the whole question of Congress policy towards industries must be resolved within the framework of an ‘allIndia industrial plan’ which this committee of experts would be asked to draw up. Accordingly, Bose in his presidential speech at the Haripura Congress in February 1938 declared that the national state ‘on the advice of a Planning Commission’ would adopt ‘a comprehensive scheme for gradually socializing our entire agricultural and industrial system in the sphere of both production and appropriation’. In October that year, Bose summoned a conference of the ministers of industries in the Congress ministries and soon after announced the formation of a National Planning Committee with Nehru as chairman. Of the fifteen members of the committee, four (Purushottamdas Thakurdas, A.D. Shroff, Ambalal Sarabhai and Walchand Hirachand) were leading merchants and industrialists, five were scientists (Meghnad Saha, A.K. Saha, Nazir Ahmed, V.S. Dubey and J.C. Ghosh), two were economists (K.T. Shah and Radhakamal Mukherjee—three, if we include M. Visvesvaraya who had just written a book on planning)—and three had been invited on their political credentials (J.C. Kumarappa the Gandhian, N.M. Joshi the labour leader and Nehru himself). The committee began work in December 1938. The National Planning Committee, whose actual work virtually ceased after about a year and a half, following the outbreak of the War, the resignation of the Congress ministries and finally Nehru's arrest in October 1940, was nevertheless the first real experience of the emerging state leadership of the Congress, and of Nehru in particular, with working out the idea of ‘national planning’. Before making a brief mention of the actual contents of the discussions in that committee, let us take note of the most significant aspects of the form of this exercise. First, planning appears as a form of determining state policy, initially the economic policies of the provincial Congress ministries, but almost immediately afterwards the overall framework of a coordinated and consistent set of policies of a national state that was already being envisioned as a concrete idea. In this respect, planning was not only a part of the anticipation of power by the state leadership of the Congress, it was also an anticipation of the concrete forms in which that power would be exercised within a national state. Second, planning as an exercise in state policy already incorporated its most distinctive element: its constitution as a body of experts and its activity as one of technical evaluation of alternative

policies and the determination of choices on ‘scientific’ grounds. Nehru, writing in 1944-45, mentioned this as a memorable part of his experience with the NPC. We had avoided a theoretical approach, and as each particular problem was viewed in its larger context, it led us inevitably in a particular direction. To me the spirit of cooperation of the members of the Planning Committee was particularly soothing and gratifying, for I found it a pleasant contrast to the squabbles and conflicts of politics (Nehru 1954: 405).

Third, the appeal to a ‘committee of experts’ was in itself an important instrument in resolving a political debate which, much to the irritation of the emerging state leadership of the Congress, was still refusing to go away. This leadership, along with the vast majority of the professional intelligentsia of India, had little doubt about the central importance of industrialization for the development of a modern and prosperous nation. Yet the very political strategy of building up a mass movement against colonial rule had required the Congress to espouse Gandhi's idea of machinery, commercialization and centralized state power as the curses of modern civilization, thrust upon the Indian people by European colonialism. It was industrialism itself, Gandhi argued, rather than the inability to industrialize, which was the root cause of Indian poverty. This was, until the 1940s, a characteristic part of the Congress rhetoric of nationalist mobilization. But now that the new national state was ready to be conceptualized in concrete terms, this archaic ideological baggage had to be jettisoned. J.C. Kumarappa brought the very first session of the NPC to an impasse by questioning its authority to discuss plans for industrialization. The national priority as adopted by the Congress, he said, was to restrict and eliminate modern industrialism. Nehru had to intervene and declare that most members of the committee felt that large-scale industry ought to be promoted as long as it did not ‘come into conflict with the cottage industries. Emphasizing the changed political context in which the Congress was working, Nehru added significantly: Now that the Congress is, to some extent, identifying itself with the State it cannot ignore the question of establishing and encouraging large-scale industries. There can be no planning if such planning does not include big industries…(and) it is not only within the scope of the Committee to consider large-scale industries, but it is incumbent upon it to consider them.

Kumarappa kept up his futile effort for a while after virtually every other member disagreed with his view and finally dropped out. Gandhi himself did not appreciate the efforts of the NPC, or perhaps he appreciated them only too well. I do not know [he wrote to Nehru] that it is working within the four corners of the resolution creating the Committee. I do not know that the Working Committee is being kept informed of its doings…. It has appeared to me that much money and labour are being wasted on an effort which will bring forth little or no fruit (Gandhi 1958: 56).

Nehru in turn did not conceal his impatience with such ‘visionary’ and ‘unscientific’ talk, and grounded his own position quite firmly on the universal principles of historical progress: ‘We are trying to catch up, as far as we can, with the Industrial Revolution that occurred long ago in Western countries’ (Nehru 1954: 93). The point here is not so much whether the Gandhian position had already been rendered politically unviable, so that we can declare the overwhelming consensus on industrialization within the NPC as the ‘reflection’ of an assignment of priorities already determined in the political arena outside. Rather, the very institution of a process of planning became a means for the determination of priorities on behalf of the ‘nation’. The debate on the need for industrialization, we may say, was resolved politically by successfully constituting planning as a domain outside ‘the squabbles and conflicts of polities’. As early as the 1940s, planning had emerged as a crucial institutional modality by which the state would determine the material allocation of productive resources within the nation—a modality of political power constituted outside the immediate political process itself.

The Rationality of the New State Why was it necessary to devise such a modality of power that could operate both inside and outside the political structure constructed by the new postcolonial state? An answer begins to appear as soon as we discover the logic by which the new state related itself to the ‘nation’. For the emerging state leadership (and as the bearer of a fundamental ideological orientation this group was much larger than simply a section of the leaders of the Congress, and in identifying it the usual classification of left and right is irrelevant), this relation was expressed in a quite distinctive way. By the 1940s, the dominant argument of nationalism against colonial rule was that it was

impeding the further development of India: colonial rule had become a historical fetter that had to be removed before the nation could proceed to develop. Within this framework, therefore, the economic critique of colonialism as an exploitative force creating and perpetuating a backward economy came to occupy a central place. One might ask what would happen to this nationalist position if (let us say, for the sake of argument) it turned out from historical investigation that by every agreed criterion, foreign rule had indeed promoted economic development in the colony. Would that have made colonialism any more legitimate, or the demand for national self-government any less justified? Our nationalist would not have accepted a purely negative critique of colonial rule as sufficient, and would have been embarrassed if the demand for self-rule was sought to be filled in by some primordial content such as race or religion. Colonial rule, he would have said, was illegitimate not because it represented the political domination by an alien people over the indigens: alienness had acquired the stamp of illegitimacy because it stood for a form of exploitation of the nation (the drain of national wealth, the destruction of its productive system, the creation of a backward economy, etc.). Self-government, consequently, was legitimate because it represented the historically necessary form of national development. The economic critique of colonialism, then, was the foundation on which a positive content was supplied for the independent national state: the new state represented the only legitimate form of exercise of power because it was a necessary condition for the development of the nation. A developmental ideology, then, was a constituent part of the selfdefinition of the post-colonial state. The state was connected to the peoplenation not simply through the procedural forms of representative government, it also acquired its representativeness by directing a programme of economic development on behalf of the nation. The former connected, as in any liberal form of government, the legal-political sovereignty of the state with the sovereignty of the people. The latter connected the sovereign powers of the state directly with the economic well-being of the people. The two connections did not necessarily have the same implications for a state trying to determine how to use its sovereign powers. What the people were able to express through the representative mechanisms of the political process as their will was not necessarily what was good for their economic well-being; what the state thought important

for the economic development of the nation was not necessarily what would be ratified through the representative mechanisms. The two criteria of representativeness, and hence of legitimacy, could well produce contradictory implications for state policy. The contradiction stemmed from the very manner in which a developmental ideology needed to cling to the state as the principal vehicle for its historical mission. ‘Development’ implied a linear path, directed towards a goal, or a series of goals separated by stages. It implied the fixing of priorities between long-run and short-run goals, and conscious choice between alternative paths. It was premised, in other words, upon a rational consciousness and will, and insofar as ‘development’ was thought of as a process affecting the whole of society, it was also premised upon one consciousness and will—that of the whole. Particular interests needed to be subsumed within the whole and made consistent with the general interest. The mechanisms of civil society, working through contracts and the market, and hence defining a domain for the play of the particular and the accidental, were already known to be imperfect instruments for expressing the general. The one consciousness, both general and rational, could not simply be assumed to exist as an abstract and formless force, working implicitly and invisibly through the particular interests of civil society. It had, as Hegel would have said, to ‘shine forth’, appear as an existent, concretely expressing the general and the rational. Hegel's penetrating logic has shown us that this universal rationality of the state can be concretely expressed at two institutional levels: the bureaucracy as the universal class, and the monarch as the immediately existent will of the state. The logical requirement of the latter was taken care of, even under the republican constitutional form adopted in India, by the usual provisions of embodying the sovereign will of the state in the person of the Head of State. In meeting the former requirement, however, the post-colonial state in India faced a problem that was produced specifically by the form of the transition from colonial rule. For various reasons that were attributed to political contingency (whose historical roots we need not explore here), the new state chose to retain in a virtually unaltered form the basic structure of the civil service, the police administration, the judicial system (including the codes of civil and criminal law), and the armed forces as they existed in the colonial period. As far as the normal executive functions of the state were concerned, the new state operated within a framework of rational

universality whose principles were seen as having been contained (even if they were misapplied) in the preceding state structure. In the case of the armed forces, the assertion of unbroken continuity was rather more paradoxical, so that even today one is forced to witness such unlovely ironies as regiments of the Indian Army proudly displaying the trophies of colonial conquest and counter-insurgency in their barrack-rooms, or the Presidential Guards celebrating their birth 200 years ago under the governor-generalship of Lord Cornwallis! But if the ordinary functions of civil and criminal administration were to continue within forms of rationality which the new state had not given to itself, how was it to claim its legitimacy as an authority that was specifically different from the old regime? This legitimacy, as we have mentioned before, had to flow from the nationalist criticism of colonialism as an alien and unrepresentative power that was exploitative in character, and from the historical necessity of an independent state that would promote national development. It was in the universal function of ‘development’ of national society as a whole that the post-colonial state would find its distinctive content. This was to be concretized by embodying within titself a new mechanism of developmental administration, something which the colonial state, because of its alien and extractive character, never possessed. It was in the administration of development that the bureaucracy of the post-colonial state was to assert itself as the universal class, satisfying in the service of the state its private interests by working for the universal goals of the nation. Planning, therefore, was the domain of the rational determination and pursuit of these universal goals. It was a bureaucratic function, to be operated at a level above the particular interests of civil society, and institutionalized as such as a domain of policy making outside the normal processes of representative politics and of execution through a developmental administration. But as a concrete bureaucratic function, it was in planning , above all, that the post-colonial state would claim its legitimacy as a single will and consciousness—the will of the nation— pursuing a task that was both universal and rational: the well-being of the people as a whole. It is in its legitimizing role, therefore, that planning, constituted as a domain outside politics, was to become an instrument of politics. If we then

look at the process of politics itself, we will discover the specific ways in which it would also become implicated in the modalities of power.

Planning and Implementing We could first describe the political process in its own terms, and then look for the connections with the process of planning. But this would take us into a lengthy excursion into a wholly different discipline. Let us, instead, start with the received understanding of the planning experience in India, and see how the political process comes to impinge upon it. Chakravarty (1987) has recently given us a summary account of this experience from within the theoretical boundaries of development planning. From this perspective, the political process appears as a determinate and changing existent when the question arises of ‘plan implementation’. Chakravarty (1987: 40-42) discusses the problems of plan implementation by treating the ‘planning authorities’ as the central directing agency, firmly situated outside the political process itself and embodying, one might justifiably say, the single, universal and rational consciousness of a state which is promoting the development of the nation as a whole. An implementational failure, Chakravarty says, occurs when (a) the planning authorities are inefficient in gathering the relevant information, (b) when they take so much time to respond that the underlying situation has by then changed, and (c) when the public agencies through which the plans are to be implemented do not have the capacities to carry them out and the private agencies combine in ‘strategic’ ways to disrupt the expectations about their behaviour which the planners had taken as ‘parametric’. Chakravarty adds that the last possibility—that of strategic action by private actors—has greatly increased in recent years in the Indian economy. Let us look a little more closely at this analysis. What does it mean to say that plans may fail because of the inadequacy of the information which planners use? The premise here is that of a separation between the planner on one hand and the objects of planning on the other, the latter consisting of both physical resources and human economic agents. ‘Information’ is precisely the means through which the objects of planning are constituted for the planner: they exist ‘out there’, independently of his consciousness, and can appear before it only in the shape of ‘information’. The ‘adequacy’ of this information then concerns the question of whether these objects have

been constituted ‘correctly’, i.e., constituted in the planner's consciousness in the same form as they exist outside it, in themselves. It is obvious that on these terms, entirely faultless planning would require in the planner nothing less than omniscience. But one should not use the patent impossibility of this project to turn planning into a caricature of itself. While the epistemological stance of apprehending the external objects of consciousness in their intrinsic and independent truth continues, as is well known, to inform the expressly declared philosophical foundations of the positive sciences (including economics), the actual practice of debates about planning is more concerned with those objects as they have been constituted by the planning exercise itself. Thus, if it is alleged that planners have incorrectly estimated the demand for electricity because they did not take into account the unorganized sector, the charge really is that whereas the ‘unorganized sector’ was already an object of planning since it was known that it too was a consumer of electricity, it had not been explicitly and specifically constituted as an object since its demand had not been estimated. The point about all questions of ‘inadequate information’ is not whether one knows what the objects of planning are: if they are not known, the problem of information cannot arise. The question is whether they have been explicitly specified as objects of planning. It is here that the issue of the modalities of knowledge and implementation become central to the planning exercise. All three conditions which Chakravarty mentions as leading to faulty implementation concern the ways in which the planner, representing the rational consciousness of the state, can produce a knowledge of the objects of planning. In this sense, even the so-called implementing agencies are the objects of planning, for they represent not the will of the planner but determinate ‘capacities’: a plan which does not correctly estimate the capacities of the implementing agencies cannot be a good plan. Consequently, these agencies—bureaucrats or managers of public enterprises—become entities which act in determinate ways according to specific kinds of ‘signals’, and these the planner must know in order to formulate his plan. The planner even needs to know how long his own machinery will take to implement a plan, or else the information on the basis of which he plans may become obsolete. If one is not to assume omniscience on behalf of the planner, how is this information ever expected to be ‘adequate’? It is here that the rationality of

planning can be seen to practise a self-deception—a necessary selfdeception, for without it, it could not constitute itself. Planning, as the concrete embodiment of the rational consciousness of a state promoting economic development, can proceed only by constituting the objects of planning as objects of knowledge. It must know the physical resources whose allocation is to be planned, it must know the economic agents which act upon these resources, know their needs, capacities and propensities, know what constitutes the signals according to which they act, know how they respond to those signals. When the agents relate to each other in terms of power, i.e., relations of domination and subordination, the planner must know the relevant signals and capacities. This knowledge would enable him to work upon the total configuration of power itself, use the legal powers of the state to produce signals and thereby affect the actions of agents, play off one power against another to produce a general result in which everybody would be better off. The state as a planning authority can promote the universal goal of development by harnessing within a single interconnected whole the discrete subjects of power in society. It does this by turning those subjects of power into the objects of a single body, of knowledge. This is where the self-deception occurs. For the rational consciousness of the state embodied in the planning authority does not exhaust the determinate being of the state. The state is also an existent as a site at which the subjects of power in society interact, ally and contend with one another in the political process. The specific configuration of power that is constituted within the state is the result of this process. Seen from this perspective, the planning authorities themselves are objects for a configuration of power in which others are subjects. Indeed, and this is the paradox which a ‘science’ of planning can never unravel from within its own disciplinary boundaries, the very subjects of social power which the rational consciousness of the planner seeks to convert into objects of its knowledge by attributing to them discrete capacities and propensities can turn the planning authority itself into an object of their power. Subject and object, inside and outside, the relations are reversed as soon as we move from the domain of rational planning, situated outside the political process, to the domain of social power exercised and contested within that process. When we talk of the state, we must talk of both of these domains as its constituent fields, and situate one in relation to the other. Seen from the domain of planning, the political process is only an external constraint ,

whose strategic possibilities must be known and objectified as parameters for the planning exercise. And yet, even the best efforts to secure ‘adequate information’ leave behind an unestimated residue, which works imperceptibly and often perversely to upset the implementation of plans. This residue, as the irreducible, negative and ever-present ‘beyond’ of planning, is what we may call, in its most general sense, politics.

The Politics of Planning: I Let us return to history, this time of more recent vintage. Chakravarty (1987: 7) says that in the early 1950s, when the planning process was initiated in India, there was a general consensus on a ‘commodity-centred’ approach. That is to say, everyone agreed that more goods were preferable to less goods, and a higher level of capital stock per worker was necessary for an improved standard of living. Obviously, the central emphasis of development was meant to be placed on accumulation. But this was not all. Chakravarty (1987: 2–3) also says that in the specific context in which planning was taken up in India, accumulation had to be reconciled with legitimation. ‘Adoption of a representative form of government based on universal adult suffrage did have an effect on the exercise of political power, and so did the whole legacy of the national movement with its specifically articulated set of economic objectives.’ These two objectives— accumulation and legitimation—produced two implications for planning in India. On one hand, planning had to be ‘a way of avoiding the unnecessary rigours of an industrial transition insofar as it affected the masses resident in India's villages’. On the other hand, planning was to become ‘a positive instrument for resolving conflict in a large and heterogeneous subcontinent’ (emphases mine). What did these mean in terms of the relation between the state and the planning process? In the classical forms of capitalist industrialization, the original accumulation required the use of a variety of coercive methods to separate a large mass of direct producers from their means of production. This was the ‘secret’ of the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, which was not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its starting point, and in a concrete historical process, it meant ‘the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil’ (Marx 1971: 667-70). The possibility and limits of original accumulation were set by the specific configuration in

each country of the political struggle between classes in the precapitalist social formation (Aston and Philpin 1987), but in each case a successful transition to capitalist industrialization required that subsistence producers be ‘robbed of all their means of production and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements’. Whatever the political means adopted to effect this expropriation of direct producers, and with it the destruction of precapitalist forms of community concretely embodying the unity of producers with the means of production, they could not have been legitimized by any active principle of universal representative democracy. (It is curious that in the one country of Europe where a ‘bourgeois’ political revolution was carried out under the slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity, the protection of small-peasant property after the revolution meant the virtual postponement of industrialization by some five or six decades.) Once in place, accumulation under capitalist production proper could be made legitimate by the equal right of property and the universal freedom of contract on the basis of property rights over commodities. Original accumulation having already effected the separation of the direct producer from the means of production, labour power was now available as a commodity owned by the labourer , who was entitled to sell it according to the terms of a free contract with the owner of the means of production. As a political ideology of legitimation of capitalist accumulation, this strictly liberal doctrine of ‘freedom’, however, enjoyed a surprisingly short life. But in the third and fourth decades of the 19th century, when the first phase of the Industrial Revolution had been completed in Britain, the new context of political conflict made it necessary to qualify ‘freedom’ by such notions as the rights to subsistence, to proper conditions of work and a decent livelihood. In time, this meant the use of the legal powers of the state to impose conditions on the freedom of contract (on hours of work, on minimum wages, on physical conditions of work and living) and to curtail the free enjoyment of returns from the productive use of property (most importantly by the taxation on higher incomes to finance public provisions for health, education, housing, etc.). While this may be seen as being consistent with the long-term objectives of capitalist accumulation, on the ground that it facilitated the continued reproduction of labour power of a suitable concretized quality, it must also be recognized that it was a political response to growing oppositional movements and social conflict. As a

political doctrine of legitimation this meant, first, the creation of a general content for social good which combined capitalist property-ownership with the production of consent through representative political processes, and second, the determination of this content not mediately through the particular acts of economic agents in civil society, but directly through the activities of the state. The course of this journey from the strictly liberal concept of ‘freedom’ to that of ‘welfare’ is, of course, coincidental with the political history of capitalist democracy in the last century-and-a-half. What we need to note here is the fact that, as a universal conception of the social whole under capitalist democracy, the elements of a concept of ‘welfare’ had already superseded those of pure freedom and were available to the political leadership in India when it began the task of constructing a state ideology. The ‘unnecessary rigours’ of an industrial transition, consequently, meant those forms of expropriation of subsistence producers associated with original accumulation which could not be legitimized through the representative processes of politics. This was, our planner would say, a parametric condition set by the political process at the time when planning began its journey in India. Yet accumulation was the prime task if industrialization was to take place. Accumulation necessarily implied the use of the powers of the state, whether directly through its legal and administrative institutions, or mediately through the acts of some agents with social power over others, to effect the required degree of dissociation of direct producers from their means of production. As Chakravarty (1987: 14) himself says, the development model first adopted in India was a variant of the Lewis model, with a ‘modern’ sector breaking down and superseding the ‘traditional’ sector, the two significant variations being that the modern sector itself was disaggregated into a capital goods and a consumer goods sector, and instead of capitalists in the modern sector, the major role was assigned to a development bureaucracy. Despite these variations, the chosen path of development still meant conflicts between social groups and the use of power to attain the required form and rate of accumulation. Since the ‘necessary’ policies of the state which would ensure accumulation could not be left to be determined solely through the political process, it devolved upon the institution of planning, that embodiment of the universal rationality of the social whole standing above all particular interests, to lay down what, in fact, were the ‘necessary rigours’ of industrialization. Given

its location outside the political process, planning could then become a ‘positive instrument for resolving conflict’ by determining, within a universal framework of the social good, the ‘necessary costs’ to be borne by each particular group and the ‘necessary benefits’ to accrue to each. But who was to use it in this way as a ‘positive instrument’? We have still to address this question. The specific form in which this twin problem of planning—accumulation with legitimation—was initially resolved, specially in the Second and Third Five-Year Plans, is well known. There was to be a capital-intensive industrial sector under public ownership, a private industrial sector in light consumer goods, and a private agricultural sector. The first two were the ‘modern’ sectors which were to be financed by foreign aid, low-interest loans and taxation of private incomes, mainly in the second sector. The third sector was seen as being mainly one of petty production, and it was there that a major flaw of this development strategy was to appear. It has been said that the Second and Third Plans did not have an agricultural strategy at all, or even if they did, there was gross over-optimism about the long-term ability of traditional agriculture to contribute to industrialization by providing cheap labour and cheap food (Chakravarty 1987: 21). The problem is often posed as one of alternative planning strategies, with the suggestion that if suitable land reforms had been carried out soon after Independence, a quite different development path may have been discovered which would have avoided the ‘crisis’ in which the planning process found itself in the middle of the 1960s. The difficulty with this suggestion, if we are to look at it from a political standpoint, is precisely the confusion it entails regarding the effective relation between the whole and the part, the universal and the particular, in the acts of a state promoting and supervising a programme of planned capitalist development. To discover the nature of this relation, we need to look upon planned industrialization as part of a process of what may be called the ‘passive revolution of capital’.

Passive Revolution Antonio Gramsci (1971: 44-120) has talked of the ‘passive revolution’ as one in which the new claimants to power, lacking the social strength to launch a full-scale assault on the old dominant classes, opt for a path in which the demands of a new society are ‘satisfied by small doses, legally, in

a reformist manner’, in such a way that the political and economic positions of the old feudal classes are not destroyed, agrarian reform is avoided, and, most important, the popular masses are prevented from going through the political experience of a fundamental social transformation. Gramsci, of course, treats this as a ‘blocked dialectic’, an exception to the paradigmatic form of bourgeois revolution which he takes to be that of Jacobinism. It now seems more useful to argue, however, that as a historical model, passive revolution is, in fact, the general framework of capitalist transition in societies where bourgeois hegemony has not been accomplished in the classical way (Sen 1988). In ‘passive revolution’, the historical shifts in the strategic relations of forces between capital, pre-capitalist dominant groups and the popular masses can be seen as a series of contingent, conjunctural moments. The dialectic here cannot be assumed to be blocked in any fundamental sense. Rather, the new forms of dominance of capital become understandable, not as the immanent supersession of earlier contradictions, but as parts of a constructed hegemony, effective because of the successful exercise of both coercive and persuasive power, but incomplete and fragmented at the same time because the hegemonic claims are fundamentally contested within the constructed whole (Chaudhuri 1988; Chatterjee 1988). The distinction between ‘bourgeois hegemony’ and ‘passive revolution’ then becomes one in which, for the latter, the persuasive power of bourgeois rule cannot be constructed around the universal idea of ‘freedom’: some other universal idea has to be substituted for it. 3 In the Indian case, we can look upon ‘passive revolution’ as a process involving a political-ideological programme by which the largest possible nationalist alliance is built up against the colonial power. The aim is to form a politically independent nation state. The means involve the creation of a series of alliances, within the organizational structure of the national movement, between the bourgeoisie and other dominant classes and the mobilization, under the leadership, of mass support from the subordinate classes. The project is a reorganization of the political order, but it is moderated in two quite fundamental ways. On one hand, it does not attempt to break up or transform in any radical way the institutional structures of ‘rational’ authority set up in the period of colonial rule. On the other hand, it also does not undertake a full-scale assault on all precapitalist dominant classes: rather, it seeks to limit their former power, neutralize them where

necessary, attack them only selectively, and in general bring them around to a position of subsidiary allies within a reformed state structure. The dominance of capital does not emanate from its hegemonic sway over ‘civil society’. On the contrary, it seeks to construct a synthetic hegemony over the domains of both civil society and the pre-capitalist community. The reification of the ‘nation’ in the body of the state becomes the means for constructing this hegemonic structure, and the extent of control over the new state apparatus becomes a precondition for further capitalist development. It is by means of an interventionist state, directly entering the domain of production as mobilizer and manager of investible ‘national’ resources, that the foundations are laid for industrialization and the expansion of capital. Yet the dominance of capital over the national state remains constrained in several ways. Its function of representing the ‘national-popular’ has to be shared with other governing groups, and its transformative role restricted to reformist and ‘molecular’ changes. The institution of planning, as we have seen, emerges in this process as the means by which the ‘necessary rigours’ of these changes are rationalized at the level, not of this or that particular group, but of the social whole . For the development model adopted in India, the ‘modern’ sector is clearly the dynamic element. Industrialization as a project emanated from the particular will of the ‘modern’ sector; the ‘general consensus’ Chakravarty refers to was, in fact, the consensus within this ‘modern’ sector. But this will for transformation had to be expressed as a general project for the ‘nation’, and this could be done by subsuming within the cohesive body of a single plan for the nation all of those elements which appeared as ‘constraints’ on the particular will of the ‘modern’ sector. If land reform was not attempted in the 1950s, it was not a ‘fault’ of planning, nor was it the lapse of a squeamish ‘political will’ of the rulers. It was because at this stage of its journey the ideological construct of the ‘passive revolution of capital’ consciously sought to incorporate within the framework of its rule not a representative mechanism solely operated by individual agents in civil society, but entire structures of the pre-capitalist community taken in their existent forms. In the political field, this was expressed in the form of the so-called ‘vote banks’, a much-talked-about feature of Indian elections in the 1950s and 1960s, by which forms of social power based on landed proprietorship or caste loyalty or religious authority were translated into ‘representative’ forms of electoral support. In the

economic field, the form preferred was that of ‘community development’, in which the benefits of plan projects meant for the countryside were supposed to be shared collectively by the whole community. That the concrete structures of existent communities were by no means homogeneous or egalitarian but were, in fact, built around pre-capitalist forms of social power, was not so much ignored or forgotten as tacitly acknowledged, for these were precisely the structures through which the ‘modernizing’ state secured legitimation for itself in the representative processes of elections. It is, therefore, misleading to suggest as a criticism of this phase of the planning strategy that the planners ‘did not realise the nature and dimension of political mobilisation that would be necessary to bring about the necessary institutional changes’ to make agriculture more productive (Chakravarty 1987: 21). Seen in terms of the political logic of ‘passive revolution’, the strategy called for was precisely one of promoting industrialization without taking the risk of agrarian political mobilization. This was an essential aspect of the hegemonic construct of the post-colonial state: combining accumulation with legitimation, while avoiding the ‘unnecessary rigours’ of social conflict. Rational strategies pursued in a political field, however, have the unpleasant habit of producing unintended consequences. Although the objective of the Indian state in the 1950s was to lay the foundations for rapid industrialization without radically disturbing the local structures of power in the countryside, the logic of accumulation in the ‘modern’ sector could not be prevented from seeping into the interstices of agrarian property, trade, patterns of consumption and even production. It did not mean a general and radical shift all over the country to capitalist farming, but there were clear signs that agrarian property had become far more ‘commoditized’ than before, that even subsistence peasant production was deeply implicated in large-scale market transactions, that the forms of extraction of agricultural surplus now combined a wide variety and changing mix of ‘economic’ and ‘extra-economic’ power, and that a steady erosion of the viability of small-peasant agriculture was increasing the ranks of marginal and landless cultivators. Perhaps there were conjunctural reasons why the ‘food crisis’ should have hit the economic (and immediately afterwards the political) life of the country with such severity in the mid-1960s. But it would not be unwarranted to point out a certain

inevitability of the logic of accumulation breaking into an agrarian social structure which the politics of the state was unwilling to transform. There were other consequences of this phase of planned industrialization under state auspices which were to be of considerable political significance.

The Politics of Planning: II The object of the strategy of ‘passive revolution’ was to contain class conflicts within manageable dimensions, to control and manipulate the many dispersed power relations in society to further as best as possible the thrust towards accumulation. But conflicts surely could not be avoided altogether. And if there were conflicts between particular interests, mobilizations based on interests were only to be expected, specially within a political process of representative democracy. In fact, the very form of legitimacy by electoral representation, insofar as it involves a relation between the state and the people, implies a mutual recognition by each, of the organized and articulate existence of the other, the general on one hand and the particular on the other. Mobilizations, consequently, did take place, principally as oppositional movements and in both the electoral and nonelectoral domains. The response of the state was to subsume these organized demands of particular interests within the generality of a rational strategy. The form of this strategy is for the state to insist that all conflicts between particular interests admit of an ‘economic’ solution—‘economic’ in the sense of allocations to each part that are consistent with the overall constraints of the whole. Thus, a particular interests whether expressed in terms of class, language, region, caste, tribe or community, is to be recognized and given a place within the framework of the general by being assigned a priority and an allocation relative to all the other parts. This, as we have seen before, is the form which the single rational consciousness of the developmental state must take—the form of planning. It is also the form which the political process conducted by the state will seek to impose on all mobilizations of particular interests; the demands, therefore, will be for a reallocation or a reassignment of priorities relative to other particular interests. It is curious to what extent a large variety of social mobilizations in the last two decades have taken both this ‘economic’ form and the form of

demands upon the state. Mobilizations which admit of demographic solidarities defined over territorial regions can usually make this claim within the framework of the federal distribution of powers. This could be either a claim for greater shares for the federal units from out of the central economic pool, or for a reallocation of the relative shares of different federal units, or even for a redefinition of the territorial boundaries of the units, or the creation of new units out of old ones. On one hand, we, therefore, have a continuous process of bargaining between the union and the states over the distribution of revenues which is sought to be given an orderly and rational form by such statutory bodies as the finance commissions, but which inevitably spills over into the disorderly immediacy of contingent political considerations, such as the compulsions of party politics, electoral advantage or the pressures of influential interest lobbies, and which takes the form of an ever-growing series of ad hoc allocations that defy rational and consistent justification. On the other hand, we also have many examples of demands for the creation of new states within the federal union. While the solidarities over which these demands are defined are cultural, such as language or ethnic identity, the justification for statehood invariably carries with it a charge of economic discrimination within the existing federal arrangement, and is thus open to political strategies operating within the ‘economic’ framework of distribution of resources between the centre and the states. For mobilizations of demographic sections which cannot claim representative status of territorial regions, the demands made upon the state are nevertheless also of an ‘economic’ form. These include not only the demands made by the organizations of economic classes, but also by social segments such as castes or tribes or religious communities. Examples of the management of class demands of this kind are, of course, innumerable and form the staple of political economy literature. They affect virtually all aspects of economic policy making, and include things like taxation, pricing, subsidies, licensing, wages, etc. But for the economic demands of ‘ethnic’ sections too, the state itself has legitimized the framework by qualifying the notion of citizenship by a set of discriminatory protections for culturally underprivileged and backward groups (lower castes, tribes) or minority religious communities. The framework has virtually transformed the nature of caste movements in India over the last fifty years from movements of. lower castes claiming higher ritual status within a

religiously sanctified cultural hierarchy, to the same castes now proclaiming their ritually degraded status in order to demand protective economic privileges in the fields of employment or educational opportunities. In response, the higher castes, whose superiority has historically rested upon the denial of any notion of ritual equality with lower castes, are now defending their economic privileges precisely by appealing to the liberal notion of equality, and by pointing out the economic inefficiencies of discriminatory protection. The point could, therefore, be made here that the centrality which the state assumes in the management of economic demands in India is not simply the result of the large weight of the public sector or the existence of state monopolies, as argued, for instance, in Bardhan (1984) or Rudolph and Rudolph (1987). Even otherwise, a developmental state operating within the framework of representative politics would necessarily require the state to assume the role of the central allocator if it has to legitimize its authority in the political domain.

The Ambiguities of Legitimation There is no doubt that the fundamental problematic of the post-colonial state—furthering accumulation in the ‘modern’ sector through a political strategy of passive revolution—has given rise to numerous ambiguities in the legitimation process. In the field of economic planning, these ambiguities have been noticed in the debates over the relative importance of market signals and state commands, over the efficiency of the private sector and the inefficiency of the state sector, over the growth potential of a relatively ‘open’ economy and the technological backwardness of the strategy of ‘self-reliance’, and over the dynamic productive potential of a relaxation of state controls compared with the entrenchment of organized privileges within the present structure of state dominance. It is not surprising that in these debates, the proponents of the former argument in each opposed pair have emphasized the dynamic of accumulation , while those defending the latter position have stressed the importance of legitimation (although there are arguments which defend the latter on the grounds of accumulation as well). We need not go into the details of each of these debates here. What should be pointed out, however, is, first, that these ambiguities are necessary consequences of the specific relation of the post-

colonial developmental state with the people-nation; second, that it is these ambiguities which create room for manoeuvre through which the passive revolution of capital can proceed; and third, that these ambiguities cannot be removed or resolved within the present constitution of the state. Let me briefly illustrate this point. Given the political process defined by the Indian state, the ambiguities of legitimacy are expressed in the wellknown forms of ‘interest-groups’. These are the variety of permanent associations of businessmen, professionals and trade unions as well as temporary agitational mobilizations based on specific issues. There are competing demands in this sector, and the state may use both coercive and persuasive powers to allocate relative priorities in satisfying these demands. But the overall constraint here is to maintain the unity of the ‘modern’ sector as a whole, for that, as we have seen before, stands forth within the body of the state as the overwhelmingly dominant element of the ‘nation’. The unity of the ‘modern’ sector is specified in terms of a variety of criteria encompassing the domains of industrial production, the professional, educational and service sectors connected with industrial production, and agricultural production outside the subsistence sector, and also embracing the effective demographic boundaries of the market for the products of the ‘modern’ sector. The identification of this sector cannot be made in any specific regional terms, nor does it coincide with a simple rural/urban dichotomy. But because of its unique standing as a particular interest which can claim to represent the dynamic aspect of the nation itself, the entire political process conducted by the state, including the political parties which stake their claims to run the central organs of the state, must work towards producing a consensus on protecting the unity of the ‘modern’ sector. Any appearance of a fundamental lack of consensus here will resonate as a crisis of national unity itself. Thus the political management of economic demands will require that a certain internal balance—an acceptable parity—be maintained between the several fractions within the modern sector. Seen from this angle, the analysis of the ‘political economy’ of Indian planning as a competitive game between privileged pressure groups within a self-perpetuating ‘modern’ sector (Bardhan 1984; Rudolph and Rudolph 1987) will appear one-sided, for it misses the fundamental ambiguity of a state process which must further accumulation, while legitimizing the ‘modern’ sector itself as representative of the nation as a whole.

Indeed, more profound ambiguities appear in the relations between the ‘modern’ sector and the rest of the people-nation. On one hand, there is the system of electoral representation on a territorial basis in the form of singlemember constituencies. On the other hand, competing demands may be voiced not only on the basis of permanent ‘interest-group' organizations, but also as mobilizations building upon pre-existing cultural solidarities such as locality, caste, tribe, religious community or ethnic identity. It would be wrong to assume that no representative process works here. Rather, the most interesting aspect of contemporary Indian politics is precisely the way in which solidarities and forms of authority deriving from the pre-capitalist community insert themselves into the representational processes of a liberal electoral democracy. This allows, on one hand, for organizations and leaders to appear in the domain of the state process claiming to represent this or that ‘community’, and for groups of people threatened with the loss of their means of livelihood or suffering from the consequences of such loss to use those representatives to seek the protection (or at least the indulgence) of the state. On the other hand, the state itself can manipulate these ‘premodern’ forms of relations between the community and the state to secure legitimacy for its developmental role (Sanyal 1988). An instance of the latter is the shift from the earlier strategy of ‘community development’ to that of distributing ‘poverty removal’ packages directly to selected target groups among the underprivileged sections. The new strategy allows for the state to use a political rhetoric in which intermediate rungs of both the social hierarchy (local power barons, dominant landed groups) and the governmental hierarchy (local officials, and even elected political representatives) can be condemned as obstacles in the way of the state trying to get across the benefits of development to the poor and the package of benefits directly presented to groups of the latter as a gift from the highest political leadership (Patnaik 1988; Kohli 1987). From the standpoint of a rational doctrine of political authority, these forms of legitimation doubtless appear as ‘premodern’, harking back to what sociologists would call ‘traditional’ or ‘charismatic’ authority. But the paradox is that the existence, the unity and indeed the representative character of the ‘modern’ sector as the leading element within the nation has to be legitimized precisely through these means. There is the other side to this relation of legitimation: the ambiguous image of the state in popular consciousness. If, as has been pointed out in

some studies (e.g., Chatterjee 1985), it is true that the state appears in popular consciousness as an external and distant entity, then, depending upon the immediate perception of local antagonisms, the state could be seen either as an oppressive intruder in the affairs of the local community, or as a benevolent protector of the people against local oppressors. The particular image in which the state appears is determined contextually. But this again opens up the possibility for the play of a variety of political strategies of which the story of modern Indian politics offers a vast range of examples. Such ambiguities show up the narrow and one-sided manner in which the ‘science’ of planning defines itself—a necessary one-sidedness, for without it the singular rationality of its practice would not be comprehensible to itself. From its own standpoint, planning will talk about the inefficiency and wastage of the public sector, about the irrationality of choosing or locating projects purely on grounds of electoral expediency, about the granting of state subsidies in response to agitational pressure. The configuration of social powers in the political process, on the other hand, will produce these inefficient and irrational results which will go down in the planning literature as examples of implementational failures. Yet, in the process of projecting the efficiency of productive growth as a rational path of development for the nation as a whole, the particular interests in the ‘modern’ sector must shift to the state the burden of defraying the costs of producing a general consent for their particular project. The state sector, identified as the embodiment of the general, must bear these social costs of constructing the framework of legitimacy for the passive revolution of capital. What we have tried to show is that the two processes—one of ‘rational’ planning and the other of ‘irrational’ politics—are inseparable parts of the very logic of this state conducting the passive revolution. The paradox, in fact, is that it is the very ‘irrationality’ of the political process which continually works to produce legitimacy for the rational exercise of the planner. While the planner thinks of his own practice as an instrument for resolving conflict, the political process uses planning itself as an instrument for producing consent for capital's passive revolution. It is not surprising, then, to discover that the rational form of the planning exercise itself supplies to the political process a rhetoric for conducting its political debates. ‘Growth’ and ‘equity’—both terms are loaded with potent rhetorical ammunition which can serve to justify as well as to contest state

policies that seek to use coercive legal powers to protect or alter the existent relations between social groups. We have shown how the very form of an institution of rational planning located outside the political process is crucial for the self-definition of a developmental state embodying the single universal consciousness of the social whole. We have also shown how the wielders of power can constrain, mould and distort the strategies of planning in order to produce political consent for their rule. What is science in one domain becomes rhetoric in the other; what is the rational will of the whole in one becomes the contingent agglomeration of particular wills in the other. The two together—this contradictory, perennially quarrelsome yet ironically well-matched couple—comprise the identity of the developmental state in India today.

Notes 1 . I am grateful to Asok Sen, Gautam Sen, the participants of the London conference, and my colleagues in the Kankurgachhi Hegel Club, for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 . This section is largely based on Chattopadhyay (1985: 82-127). 3 . I am grateful to Kalyan Sanyal for suggesting this point.

References Aston, T.H. and C.H.E. Philpin (eds). 1987. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bardhan, Pranab. 1984. The Political Economy of Development in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chakravarty, Sukhamoy. 1987. Development Planning: The Indian Experience. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chatterjee, Partha. 1985. Bengal: The Land Question. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi. ——. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ——. 1988. ‘On Gramsci's “Fundamental Mistake”, Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy , 23 (5): PE24-26. Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra. 1985. ‘The Idea of Planning in India, 1930-1951’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Chaudhuri, Ajit. 1988. ‘From Hegemony to Counter-hegemony’, Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy , 23 (5): PE19-23. Gandhi, M.K. 1958. Collected Works , 70. New Delhi: Publications Division

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971 (trans, by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Kohli, Atul. 1987. The State and Poverty in India: The Politics of Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. 1971 (trans. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling). Capital , 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1954. Jawaharlal Nehru's Speeches , 2. New Delhi: Publications Division. Patnaik, Arun. 1988. ‘Gramsci's Concept of Hegemony: The Case of Development Administration in India’, Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy , 23 (5): PE12-18. Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1987. In Search of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Mumbai: Orient Longman. Sanyal, Kalyan K. 1988. ‘Accumulation, Poverty and the State in the Third World’, Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy , 23 (5): PE27-30. Sen, Asok. 1988. ‘The Frontiers of the Prison Notebooks’, Economic and Political Weekly: Review of Political Economy , 23 (5): PE31-36.

6 The State in India's Economic Development PRABHAT PATNAIK Attempts to explain actions of the state in terms of the level of ‘enlightenment’ of the decision makers are as plentiful as they are naive. But even among those who recognize material interests, specially class interests, as underlying state action, there is often a tendency to see the relationship in undialectical terms, i.e., to miss the fact that the course of development initiated within a particular policy-regime itself unleashes changes in class configuration, which in turn gives rise to policy shifts. The purpose of this paper is to provide a ‘reading’ along these lines of the changing role of the state in India's development trajectory.

I All sectors of social opinion at Independence visualized a leading role for the state in the development process. This was illustrated, for instance, by the convergence on this subject between the alternative plans submitted at the time, the Bombay Plan and the Peoples’ Plan: 1 laissez-faire in a world dominated by imperialism would have meant not breaking out, in however partial a form, from subjugation to the extant international division of labour. The real difference among different strands of social opinion related to what the precise form of that role was to be, and hence what the nature of that development was to be (and, by implication, what the class orientation of that state was to be). One can distinguish here between three positions. On one side were the authors of the Bombay Plan, representing domestic big business, who

visualized planning as an aid to capitalist development, where the hegemony of foreign capital is replaced by that of the domestic big bourgeoisie, but no radical redistribution of property occurs within the country in favour of small producers or the landless. The role of the state was seen essentially as that of a midwife-cum-nurse for Indian monopoly capitalism. This perspective came through clearly from the Bombay Plan: its invocation of Keynes (whose doctrines were not incompatible with the preservation of monopoly capitalism); its suggestion of large-scale deficit financing to set up the public sector, which, far from impinging on capitalists’ profits, would, in fact, add to them (via the well-known route of profit inflation and ‘forced savings’ by the working masses); its emphasis on the direction of public investment towards the transport, communications and other ‘overhead’ sectors which would not tread on capitalists’ toes; its advocacy that public-sector units should be sold off to the private sector after a time-lag; and its complete silence on any need to enlarge the home market and energize the productive forces through asset redistribution. In contrast to this was the position of the Communist and nearCommunist Left. It also did not see the public sector and planning as ushering in socialism (for which an initial prerequisite was a seizure of power by the workers and peasants); 2 but it did see them (or, more generally, the phenomenon of state capitalism) as an essential element in the struggle against imperialism. State capitalism, it recognized, would be used for capitalist development. But if this development was to be vigorous, and consistently anti-imperialist, then it had to be broad-based, for which a radical redistribution of assets, in particular of land, was essential. The Left, therefore, pressed for radical land reforms, including land redistribution and a host of steps for curbing the power of the monopoly capitalists as a part of the strategy of planned development. This position, of course, did not get reflected in policy after Independence. What is more, the Indian bourgeoisie, which managed to retain its hegemony over the anti-colonial struggle, did not, when it came to power, smash landlordism and pre-capitalist structures, chose instead to enter into an alliance with the landlords. The bourgeois-landlord state that thus came into being sought to promote capitalism on the basis of the existing concentration of property, specially landed property, as a superimposition upon the extant social structure. This, of course, was

entirely in conformity with the historically-observed behaviour of the bourgeoisie elsewhere as well: the lateness of its arrival upon the historical scene makes it reluctant to attack old landed property lest it rebound into an attack on bourgeois property itself. The Left, however, continued to press for radical land redistribution not because it believed that it would be actually implemented by the extant state, but as a means of projecting its understanding and analysis of what constituted the minimum set of measures for putting the country on an alternative trajectory that would be true to the promise of the freedom struggle (in following which, however, further measures would become necessary). 3 The third position is what crystallized as the official position. The social weight of the urban petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, not to mention the working class, ensured that, notwithstanding big-business dominance over the state, the official position did not amount to a complete endorsement of the agenda of big business. While it adopted a socialist rhetoric (though the actual objective was stated to be the achievement of a ‘socialistic pattern of society’), visualized the public sector as a permanent phenomenon, drew attention periodically to the need for land reforms and enacted certain land reform measures (through the instrumentality of the state governments, all of which were Congress-led), it never took the task of radical land redistribution seriously. Its land reform measures succeeded at most in eliminating very large zamindars, giving ownership rights to rich tenants, and thus creating a relatively more homogeneous class of landowners, but it did not give ‘land to the tiller’ (whether landless labourers or poor tenants and sharecroppers). 4 These differences in perceptions regarding what kind of planning to have, however, did not preclude wide support for the planning that did emerge. The Left, though persistently critical of the path of development being pursued, nonetheless extended support to state capitalism as an antiimperialist measure: it might be fraught with contradictions which would be exacerbated over time, but without it any anti-imperialist stance made no sense. The big capitalists might not have been happy with the precise contours of state capitalism as they emerged, but there was no denying the enormously expanded opportunities that it presented them with. And even the advanced capitalist metropolis had less cause to be displeased with it than if India had actually gone along a socialist path (though this point was

fully appreciated only in the post-Dulles years). True, India was not a ‘client state’ of the metropolis, and there is no denying the relative autonomy that Indian capitalist development acquired. But from the point of view of the metropolis, things could have been worse. Thus, even the type of planning that India had, appeared to command a consensus in the beginning. 5

II Preserving the extant land concentration and reforming it from above by (a) inducing the feudal and semi-feudal landlords to convert themselves into capitalist landlords, and (b) carrying out a modicum of land distribution only at the top (which did not break overall land concentration) by strengthening the position of an upper stratum of the rich peasantry in the hope that it would convert itself into that of capitalist farmers, had a number of implications. First of all, it restricted the development of the productive forces in agriculture for at least three reasons, (a) Even in the context of individual farming, a clear delineation of property relations in accordance with bourgeois legality is essential for any productive accumulation. If the bulk of the peasantry is either altogether excluded from the right to its produce because it has the status of tenants, or even when it formally enjoys this right, as with petty proprietors, it cannot enforce this right legally because bourgeois legality does not prevail in a countryside socially dominated by the landlords, then productive accumulation is bound to suffer, (b) Even as far as the landlords are concerned, if pre-capitalist modes of accumulating wealth (e.g., through usury, snatching peasants’ produce, and rack-renting) remain possible, they compete against productive accumulation. It is essential for such accumulation that the route to social power be through the magnitude of productive capital at a person's command rather than independent of it. The prevalence of landlordism in this sense comes in the way of productive accumulation even by the landlords themselves, (c) In Asian conditions, moreover, where water management is crucial for agricultural growth, certain cooperative forms of social organization become essential for the realization of the productive potential in agriculture. And this requires a modicum of social equality in the countryside, which landlordism subverts.

The second implication of an unreformed agrarian structure was equally profound. It restricted the domestic market for mass-consumption industrial goods which also tend to be more labour-intensive, less technologyintensive, and less import-intensive. Right from the beginning, therefore, an opportunity for traversing a path of development, along which industry would have catered to the simple needs of the peasantry, and would have grown more rapidly (owing to the faster growth of agriculture and hence peasant incomes) together with faster employment growth, was lost. Instead, a path of development was adopted where growth was lower, socially narrow-based, heavily dependent upon the continuous expansion of public investment, and accompanied by a level of employment growth that was patently incapable of absorbing the existing labour reserves, thus perpetuating unemployment and poverty, which the absence of land redistribution had left untouched to start with. The role of the state was crucial along this path of development: the growth in its spending directly and indirectly expanded the market, which in turn provided the capitalists with the inducement to invest; 6 the growth in its spending also filled the gaps in the production structure which had existed in the colonial economy; the specialized financial institutions it set up enabled the capitalists to overcome the limitations of the weak capital market; the protection against foreign competition it provided made possible a diversification of the production structure away from the inherited international division of labour; and the state capitalist sector it set up spearheaded the development of domestic technological ability, and, aided by the socialist countries, undermined to an extent the technological monopoly of metropolitan capital, loosening its stranglehold over vital sectors of the economy, even as collaborations with it continued. The big bourgeoisie, to be sure, would have been happier if the state had been even more pliable in its hands, if for example, the state enterprises were handed over to it for running, after being set up by the state, as happened in Japan. But, while the prevailing class configuration made that impossible, Indian-style dirigisme nonetheless buttressed the development of capitalism, and gave it a sweep that would have been unimaginable otherwise. To say that its sweep would have been even greater and its ability to meet social needs less limited if it had been built upon the destruction of inherited pre-capitalist structures is not to deny its achievements.

III The contradictions of this path of development lay in the following. First, the state had to fulfil two quite distinct roles which were mutually incompatible under the prevailing class configuration. On one hand, it had to keep expanding its investment as the chief means of stimulating growth in the system. On the other hand, it also had to serve as an instrument for the primary (or primitive) accumulation of capital by the capitalists and landlords. It was, to be sure, not the only instrument: evictions, encroachments upon common land, cordoning off of forest land from previous users, all played their part. But the state became a major instrument as well, and the mechanism was simple. Through a variety of means, e.g., revealed and concealed budgetary transfers, tax evasion, the award of lucrative contracts, and appropriation of funds from state financial institutions through the simple expedient of default on loans, the state, in particular the state budget, was used to build up private wealth. The counterpart of this was a squeeze on the real living standards of the masses through inflation, whether engendered by deliberate price hikes and indirect tax hikes, or by deficit financing. Given the class configuration which enforced the preservation of bourgeois democratic institutions, inflation had to be kept within some limits; together with inflation, therefore, there was a slackening in the tempo of public investment, and with it a slackening of the rate of growth of the system. The inability of the state to combine both increases in its spending with the promotion of primitive accumulation of capital under the prevailing class configuration generated a tendency towards economic stagnation. Second, the very amorphousness of the ruling-class alliance robbed the state of the ability to impose any degree of discipline upon any segment of this alliance. Capitalism is, no doubt, a system which robs the workers of the fruits of their labour, but it is not a system of random robbery. It functions according to certain rules of the game which are enshrined in codes of bourgeois legality and are enforced upon the capitalists themselves. In other words, capitalism cannot function unless a measure of discipline is enforced by the state upon the capitalists themselves, and, indeed, upon other classes. No doubt, a period of primitive accumulation does see a devaluation of bourgeois legality; nonetheless, even in such

periods, there are alternative hidden codes of conduct, different from the explicit bourgeois legal code, which are followed. In South Korea, for instance, as in Japan, there was massive corruption and private enrichment at the expense of the public exchequer; nonetheless, the South Korean capitalists were given export obligations which they had to fulfil. Primitive accumulation, in other words, did not entail a total subversion of discipline. With an amorphous class alliance (as in India), however, the state, despite its all-pervasive presence, was unable to impose this essential element of discipline. 7 Third, the nature of the bourgeoisie itself was contradictory. A manifestation in the economic sphere of this contradictoriness, its proneness to compromising with imperialism even while confronting it, was the fact that even while setting up a productive apparatus under its own aegis, it hankered after metropolitan goods in preference to the commodities turned out by itself. Both the second and the third contradictions strengthened the tendencv towards stagnation and atrophy mentioned earlier. This stagnation did manifest itself explicitly for a while from the mid1960s to the mid-1970s, when, in order to control the excessive inflation that was unleashed, the tempo of public investment was lowered. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the growth rate picked up, as the state attempted to resolve the contradiction between the need to keep up investment and to promote primitive accumulation in a novel manner. Instead of engendering inflation, which was a visible attack upon the living standards of the entire working population and called forth resistance, e.g., the railway strike, it attempted to achieve the same end through an attack on the peasantry and the rural poor by turning the terms of trade against them. Since they are less organized and take time to build up their resistance, this gave it a certain breathing space. By the mid-1980s, however, the contradictions had become so acute, the current account budget itself having run into a deficit, that yet another tactic was tried, namely, borrowing from abroad. By its very nature, this can only be a temporary expedient. It was at all possible because major changes were taking place in the world capitalist economy that had resulted in a tremendous strengthening of finance capital which was keen to extend its tentacles all over the world. As the Indian economy piled up debt, a crash in the form of a collapse of creditors’ confidence that dries up further loans and leads to a capital flight became inevitable. This crash came in 1991, paving the way

for the IMF (International Monetary Fund) to come in with its ‘liberalization-cum-structural adjustment’ package. 8

IV To see the new package as entailing a ‘retreat of the state’ is seriously misleading. It does, of course, entail a retreat of the state from its role as a producer and investor, i.e., a ‘rolling back’ of the state capitalism of the earlier dirigiste development strategy. But it underscores an alternative role of the state, as buttressing the position of large capital. Since the latter itself exists in a differentiated form, this amounts effectively to a support for MNCs (Multi-National Corporations) in preference to domestic capitalists, a support for capital-as-finance in preference to capital-in-production, and, of course, a support for large capital in general against the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the small capitalists. The state becomes an agent directly and openly promoting private enrichment, through the sale of state property ‘for a song’, through the handing over to private (specially foreign) hands of the control over natural resources, through offering guaranteed rates of return on private investment in certain sectors, and through offering very high interest rates on state loans. Simultaneously, the benefits of this enrichment are confined to a small circle. Private enrichment remains highly centralized: ‘import liberalization’ decimates small capital; high interest rates and ‘financial liberalization’, resulting in the progressive elimination of differential interest rates and priority-sector credit, further reduces its viability; and the removal of the policy of ‘reservation’ of particular spheres for small capital makes it easy prey to encroachment by monopolists. This, then, is the thrust of ‘liberalization’. India may not have seen the full gamut of these measures, but that is besides the point. No matter how far a particular country has proceeded along the liberalization path, the direction in which this path leads is unmistakable. It follows that liberalization too is sustained by a particular class configuration. And this configuration took shape during the functioning of the earlier dirigiste regime. What is this configuration? The leading element of the alliance pressing for (or supporting) liberalization is international finance capital. This entity is not synonymous with the finance capital that Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin had written

about. Their concept of finance capital was nation state-based, referred in varying degrees to a coalescence between industry and finance—this was less true of Hobson—and visualized a confrontation between rival blocs of it. What we have today is a remarkable, degree of unity, rather than rivalry, among the metropolitan powers and their finance capitals, a remarkable degree of fluidity and hence non-rootedness (in industry or any other sectors) of this finance capital, and its unparalleled international reach. What we have, in other words, is a huge bloc of finance, dominated no doubt by finance from the metropolis but devoid largely of any national character, of which the finance from individual countries is increasingly becoming aliquot parts, and which moves around the globe in quest of opportunities for quick profits (essentially speculative gains). The rise to ascendancy of this international finance capital from the position to which finance capital generally had been reduced in the immediate post-War world, dominated by Keynesianism with its call for the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, 9 is a matter that need not detain us here. The point is that the Bretton Woods programme with its emphasis not just on trade liberalization but on the removal of restrictions on capital flows, on ‘financial liberalization’ and on currency unification and convertibility serves, above all, the interests of international finance capital by prising open Third World economies to its unhindered access, exit, and operation. This is not the only element. Indeed, the liberalization programme represents a convergence of interests between MNCs keen on penetrating Third World markets, international finance capital, sections of the domestic bourgeoisie keen on breaking out of the straitjacket of the national economy where the contradictions of the dirigiste regime, mentioned earlier, progressively restrict opportunities of accumulation, the kulak and landlord elements lured by the promise of export agriculture (a promise that does not necessarily get realized subsequently as prices crash), and sections of the elite that benefit from globalization in terms of access to opportunities and commodities. But it bears, above all, the stamp of international finance capital. There is, thus, a shift through time in class configuration. From a situation dominated by the domestic monopoly bourgeoisie in alliance with landlords, engaged in carving out a space for itself in opposition to metropolitan capital (even while collaborating with it), and for that reason enlisting the support of other classes (notwithstanding the fact that its

aggrandizement perpetuates the misery of the poor), there is a transition to an alliance between the ruling classes and metropolitan capital, notably finance capital, under the hegemony of the latter which arrays itself against the other domestic classes. The reasons for this shift, which underlies the shift from dirigisme to liberalization, have to do with international developments, like the emergence to prominence of finance capital, and with internal developments like the loss of social support for the dirigiste strategy as it gets progressively enmeshed in contradictions. But the promise with which the ‘neo-liberal’ strategy neutralizes its opponents, namely, that it would usher in more rapid growth, never materializes. On the contrary, the pursuit of this strategy leads to economic stagnation and a tendency towards a fracturing of national unity.

V The tendency towards economic stagnation is directly related to the deindustrialization caused by debt-financed import liberalization, the deflation imposed in the hope of keeping the confidence of international finance in the economy so that there is no speculative outflow of ‘hot money’, and the cutback in public investment which actually tends to reduce rather than enlarge private investment. This last proposition needs some elaboration. The claim that if only more surplus value is handed over to the capitalists they would automatically invest more is completely untenable. As a matter of fact, capitalists undertake productive investment only when they expect to be able to sell the ensuing larger output at a suitable rate of profit, i.e., only to the extent that they expect the market for their products to expand. No doubt, the growth of the market is something to which their own investment behaviour in the aggregate is a major contributor, but obviously the whole investment process is supported, and has to be supported, by some exogenous stimuli (Kalecki 1954). The three possible sustained stimuli which can play such a role in an economy like ours are: public investment (and expenditure in general), the growth of the home market arising from rapid agricultural growth, and the growth of exports other than of primary commodities (since larger primary commodity exports may merely mean diversion of production from home use rather than larger production). Of these, exports, no matter how rapidly

they grow (within the bounds of plausibility), can scarcely be of much importance as an investment stimulus for a large-sized economy. And attempts to entice export-oriented direct foreign investment to locate plants within the home economy to produce for the international market succeed mainly in attracting capital-as-finance or ‘hot money’ inflows. On the other hand, the growth of the home market arising from the agricultural sector remains constrained by the absence of egalitarian land reforms, and, even within the existing agrarian structure, by the cutbacks in public investment that are imposed under liberalization. This last factor (and the general restriction on public spending of which it is a part) also eliminates the stimulus provided by public investment through the demand it generates directly or indirectly for a host of commodities. The rolling back of state capitalism, far from increasing the investment ratio, causes its stagnation and even decline, which, together with the general tendency towards deflation, results in a slowing down of growth even compared to the days of dirigisme . Even in India where liberalization has not had its full play owing to substantial domestic opposition, this tendency is evident (Rai 1998).

VI Thus, liberalization (or globalization) which is ushered in on the promise of higher growth, produces no such thing. On the other hand the stagnation, the unemployment, the impoverishment which it produces, together with the consequent increase in crime and violence (which further snuffs out whatever prospects had remained of productive capital inflow), leads to a fracturing of national unity for at least three reasons. First, there is the ‘secessionism of the rich’. If the growth prospects of the nation get tied to the degree of success in enticing direct foreign investment, then the richer regions feel that they would be better placed in this regard if they acted on their own, unencumbered by the burden of belonging to the same country as the poor, violent, crime-infested regions. But the secessionism of the rich is not confined to rich regions alone. Within the bureaucracy, within the intelligentsia, within the professionals, there is a division, a ‘dualism’ created between those who can ‘network’ successfully with the metropolis, and the others. And since no country can function without an effective intelligentsia, a cadre of bureaucrats, a group of

teachers, scientists, etc., this ‘secession of the mind’ has a totally debilitating effect on the country. Second, at the other end of the spectrum, i.e., among the poor too, there is a tendency for phenomena like separatism, secessionism, and communalism, etc., to take root. Unemployment, deindustrialization and impoverishment, though their impact can be potentially radicalizing, are more often conducive to the growth of separatist, and even fascist tendencies. The cause of the persisting misery of the local population is often located in the presence of ‘outsiders’, in which case there emerges a separatist tendency. Sometimes a particular religious group, or a particular linguistic community which is alleged to be more prosperous than the others is singled out as being responsible for the economic predicament of the rest of the population, and that provides the excuse for organizing pogroms against it. What is common to all such movements is the fact of a complete absence of any credible economic programme. The third tendency, which, notwithstanding superficial similarities, is quite distinct from the second one, is the tendency towards the emergence of religious fundamentalism. This has usually a populist, anti-consumerist, and even an anti-imperialist thrust which is completely lacking in communalism or regional chauvinism. Fundamentalism of this kind does represent a conscious reaction to the fallout of globalization in the form of privileged islands, the consumerism of the elite, and its subservience to the culture of the metropolis, but it represents a reactionary response . These tendencies are not watertight: all three in varying degrees appear in strength in a globalized economy. And whether looked at singly, or in terms of their conjoint outcome, their effect is to destroy the unity of the nation. They are the flip side of the globalization coin, and represent a fracturing of the totalizing idea of a nation and the coming to the fore of divisive tendencies. It is no accident that the advance of the globalization project in India has been accompanied by a remarkable strengthening of the communal forces. The strength of anti-imperialist nationalism and that of communalism are inversely related. As the dream of a prosperous, vibrant and independent India, independent of the hegemony of advanced capitalist countries has faded, the quest for an alternative identity, an identity where the ‘other’ has shifted from imperialism to the Muslims who have perpetrated imaginary wrongs, has gathered strength. As India's policy, notably in the sphere of the

economy (but elsewhere as well) has shifted from a general (no matter how diluted) stance of anti-imperialism to one of progressively bartering away sovereignty for the sake of obtaining loans and enticing MNCs, the assertion of an alternative identity which is more ‘pragmatic’ as well, has become more appealing. It is not surprising that the BJP sees no contradiction between its brand of ‘nationalism’ and imperialism. It is not surprising that NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) who have chosen to migrate out of the country and actually live in the West are among the strongest votaries of Hindutva.

VII India's progress in the direction of liberalization has been slow and halting because of domestic opposition. But the effect of even this progress in increasing poverty (Sen and Patnaik 1997) has created a degree of disillusionment with liberalization. And this creates the conditions for the introduction of an alternative trajectory, altogether different from the dirigiste and liberalization trajectories, involving a different role of the state, sustained by a different class configuration and a different economic programme. This programme, though bourgeois-democratic in character, would be in opposition to the hegemony of imperialism, and hence would have to be based on a mobilization of the workers and peasants. Its basic elements would be the following. Instead of the strategy of ‘international export-led industrialization’, the alternative strategy would emphasize ‘internal export-led industrialization’, i.e., industrialization sustained by exports from industry to an agriculture growing rapidly on the basis of radical land redistribution. 10 The alternative strategy would emphasize that the way out of bureaucratic dirigisme lies not in a subordination to international finance capital in the name of introducing ‘efficiency’ through liberalization, but in a strengthening of democratic institutions, including the devolution of resources and decision making to elected local-level bodies which are directly supervised by the people. The fiscal crisis of the state would be overcome not through privatization and giving tax concessions to the rich but by taxing the rich, enforcing tax compliance through punitive actions against black money-holders, lowering interest rates, and reducing wasteful expenditure. The alternative to the

withdrawal of the state on grounds of alleged inefficiency, corruption and profligacy would be its greater accountability to the people . In short, the essence of the alternative emerges from the recognition that in going beyond the dirigiste stage of development, the choice is between the surrender of sovereignty to international finance capital, and the retention of sovereignty and freedom through the strengthening of democracy . The alternative trajectory emerging from this perspective does not transcend the boundaries of a bourgeois programme, but, as Lenin had recognized, the direction of socialist advance also lies through a bourgeois programme. To be sure, any such programme which envisages a shift away from the hegemony of the metropolis, no matter how ripe the conditions for its acceptance may be domestically, would involve resistance from international finance capital, not necessarily in the form of a conspiracy, but simply as a spontaneous response of speculators. The ability of such spontaneous response to destabilize economies overnight is demonstrated by the recent developments in East and South East Asian countries. But the very fact that liberalization has been incomplete (in particular the fact that the currency is not fully convertible, financial sector reforms have not yet proceeded far, the maturity structure of the external debt is not too heavily weighed in favour of short-term debt, and the magnitude of ‘hot money’ that has come in is not too large relative to reserves) gives India a degree of insulation from the depredations of speculators. And as regards the hostility of metropolitan countries, the very mobilization of the people around a new programme which may arouse this hostility also provides a means of standing up to it.

Notes 1 . For a brief discussion of alternative plan formulations at the time, see Namboodiripad (1974) and Bettelheim (1968: Ch. VII). The discussion in this section of the paper is based on Patnaik (1998). 2 . Such a seizure under the leadership of the working class, it was held, would complete the democratic revolution, and create the conditions for a transition to a socialist revolution. This theoretical position descended from Lenin (1963). 3 . In other words, these measures were in the nature of ‘transitional demands’ (in Leninist terminology). 4 . For a discussion of land reform measures, see Joshi (1975). For the implications for capitalist development of the particular land reform measures that were undertaken, see

U. Patnaik (1986). 5 . This apparent consensus has been drawn attention to by several writers. An example is Desai (1970). 6 . This point is discussed in greater detail later in this paper. 7 . This amorphousness, in turn, was perhaps a reflection of the fact that capitalist development had proceeded much further in India at the time of Independence than in countries like South Korea, which made class formations more variegated and crystallized and class demands more articulate. 8 . For a detailed discussion of the background to and implications of ‘structural adjustment’, see Patnaik and Chandrashekhar (1995). 9 . Keynes (1936: Ch. 24, p. 376). 10 . Nicholas Kaldor (1978) argued some time ago that taking the capitalist world as a whole, industrialization was agriculture-led, i.e., industrialization in the advanced capitalist world occurred essentially through exchange with the primary producing economies. This idea is reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg (1972).

References Bettelheim, C. 1968. India Independent . New York: Monthly Review Press. Desai, M. 1970. ‘The Vortex in India’, The New Left Review , May-June: 43–60. Joshi, P.C. 1975. Land Reforms in India; Trends and Perspectives . Mumbai: Allied Publishers. Kaldor, N. 1978. Further Essays in Economic Theory . London: Duckworth. Kalecki, M. 1954. Theory of Economic Dynamics . New York: Reinhart. Keynes, J.M. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money . London: Macmillan & Co. Lenin, V.I. 1963. Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Selected Works , 3 vols, vol. 3. Luxemburg, R. 1972. The Accumulation of Capital . New York: Monthly Review Press. Namboodiripad, E.M.S. 1974. Indian Planning in Crisis . Trivandrum: Chintha Publishers. Patnaik, P. 1998. ‘Some Indian Debates in Planning’, in T.J. Byres (ed.), The Indian Economy: Major Debates Since Independence , pp. 159-92. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Patnaik, P. and C.P. Chandrashekhar. 1995. ‘The Indian Economy Under Structural Adjustment’, Economic and Political Weekly , 30 (47), 25 November: 3001-13. Patnaik, U. 1986. The Agrarian Question and the Development of Capitalism in India . New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rai, Kartik. 1998. ‘Growth Trajectory of the Post-Reform Indian Economy’, The Marxist . Calcutta: CPI (M). Sen, A. and U. Patnaik. 1997. ‘Poverty in India’, CESP Working Paper, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

7 The Political Economy of Reform in India PRANAB BARDHAN The reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new. —Niccolo Machiavelli, in The Prince (1513), Ch. VI.

I In the last few years I have often been asked if my thinking on the low-level equilibrium described in the main part of the book Political Economy of Development in India (written nearly fifteen years ago) have changed in view of the ongoing economic reforms. Starting in the mid-1980s, but accelerating since the external payments crisis in mid-1991, India's industrial licensing and regulatory policies, trade, tax, investments, and fiscal policies have undergone substantial changes. In this paper, I shall briefly discuss the political economy of reform in India. I shall comment less on what should or should not have been done, and more on the sociopolitical background of what has been done; less on what is desirable and more on what is feasible. In doing this, I shall have to necessarily move beyond economics, and at times dabble in political sociology. My comments are also confined to broad long- or medium-run patterns, and not to the ups and downs of the economy in the short run. I have noticed in recent literature two opposed general positions on the pace and prospect of reforms. One of these takes the rosy view that dramatic changes in policy have taken place since 1991, and that more could be done but for the messy politics that occasionally slow down reforms, for example, those relating to the insurance sector or industrial labour. But the reform process is now essentially irreversible, and most

political leaders give assurances to this effect to business, despite rhetorical deviations in some of their public speeches. The other view is more pessimistic: only the easier reforms have been handled so far (given that the nightmarish extent to which the system of licences and permits was stretched in the earlier regime was unacceptable to most people) while many difficult reforms have been stalled and are likely to remain so, given the path of rag-tag coalition politics that the country seems to be inevitably taking. My own position in this respect is somewhere in between these two opposed general views. But I would like to differentiate my view from another intermediate position, taken, for example, by Jenkins (1997). This position is essentially about reform by stealth: that a great deal of substantial reforms has been accomplished, avoiding major headlines of political confrontations; a process of slow but steady creeping reform has set in, according to this view, and is likely to continue. In my judgement, this intermediate position has considerable plausibility. I shall, therefore, discuss this position at some length, and point out where I agree and where I don't. But first we need to work at some aggregative statistics on growth and investment, to give us some indication about the quantum of these changes in terms of macroeconomic outcome. Next we shall discuss some methodological points to help us interpret these data. Finally, we will move into issues concerning political economy. For the macro-data, we shall draw upon the careful analysis of the National Accounts Statistics for the period of 1980-81 to 1995-96 made by Nagaraj (1997). One advantage of these statistics is that they allow for a relatively long time series, and one does not have to depend on simple yearto-year variations in growth rates. On the basis of the time series one can say that overall GDP, as well as sectoral GDP in primary and tertiary sectors, roughly maintained its earlier (i.e., of the 1980s) growth rates in the 1990s. There have been no dramatic changes in these rates. In fact, there is a small but statistically significant decline in the secondary sector (including manufacturing) in the 1990s compared to the 1980s. (The addition of the last two years, 1996-97 and 1997-98, when data are available, is unlikely to change this, as on all indications the growth ‘rates in the industrial sector have slowed down in these two years.)

Within the manufacturing sector, one expects some decline in importsubstitute industries with trade liberalization. 1 This has happened sharply in the capital goods industries. One indicator of the increased competition in these industries is the fall in prices of machinery and equipment relative to the GDP deflator since the late 1980s. Some consumer goods, particularly durables, experienced growth, fuelled by a rise in effective protection (due to devaluation as well as a fall in the relative price of inputs). Contrary to the usual expectation of the effect of trade liberalization, there has, however, not been much of an increase in the growth of traded, labourintensive goods. In fact, the growth rate in the unregistered manufacturing sector (which employs nearly half the total labour in manufacturing) declined from an average of 7.6 per cent in 1986-91 to 5.7 per cent in 199296. There has also been a marked decline in the growth rate of total employment in the organized sector as a whole in the 1990s as compared to the 1980s. Again, contrary to expectation, some of the non-traded, tertiary sectors recorded a significant increase in growth. Much of the large rise in the growth rate in private corporate gross fixed capital formation has gone into the tertiary sector (most likely into finance and real estate). The share of infrastructure in total gross fixed capital formation in the economy declined from 37 per cent in 1986-87 to 26 per cent in 1995-96. This was associated with the decline in the public-sector gross capital formation as a percentage of GDP. 2 It is now agreed on all counts that India's creaking infrastructure (power, railways, roads, ports, etc.) is the major bottleneck for industrial growth. In interpreting the decline in the manufacturing growth rate in the 1990s, it is important to keep in mind one methodological point: the effects of liberalization should be carefully distinguished from those of macroeconomic stabilization. Some of the adverse effects of the credit crunch in the first half of the 1990s or the fiscal squeeze necessitated by the past and present profligacy in our public fisc should not be attributed to liberalization per se, even in cases where one could think of better ways of carrying out the corrective fiscal and financial policies. For example, the sharp decline in growth of the unregistered manufacturing sector noted above may have much to do with the difficulty of getting credit that this sector faced. 3 It is also to be noted that the growth rate in the 1980s, financed to some extent by large external borrowings, may not have been macroeconomically sustainable for long, and thus any comparison with the

1980s growth rate has to be qualified to that extent. It is also possible that it is as yet too soon for the effects of the structural changes that have taken place since 1991 to show up in aggregative growth statistics. In scattered parts of the economy (including in some public enterprises), 4 increased competition and restructuring may have improved total factor productivity, but hard evidence for this on a sustained basis and an adequately large scale is not yet available. The other methodological point to note in discussing the effects of policy changes is that some reforms came not by design, but more as unintended consequences of bankruptcy. This is particularly the case at the state level. Some reforms have generated a chain reaction creating a demand for pushing the reforms further than what was originally intended. We shall come back to this point when we discuss the issue of creeping reforms.

II Next we discuss the politics of reforms. Politics is about distributive conflicts, about winners and losers, and how they get organized about it or fail to. Who are the losers from reforms so far? The most vocal group in opposition is organized labour. Of course, not many jobs have been lost in government service (the part of the Fifth Pay Commission Report which recommended streamlining and reducing the future size of the government did not have any takers, in contrast to the part about pay revisions), although there is a fear of potential job loss from privatization. In contrast to the white-collar labour unions, the labour movement for the manual or blue-collar workers is actually highly fragmented, an issue we shall take up later. The other vocal group, ignoring the occasional vandalism against Kentucky Fried Chicken or Cargill Seed Farm by organized farmers, is that of Indian business houses. Some of them have been clamouring for a ‘level playing field’, when they perceived their traditional family control to be threatened by foreign multinationals. 5 Patriotism is, of course, the first refuge of laggards in competition. 6 Yet all major political parties (the Left parties, BJP, the Janata Party and even the Congress) have played the ‘swadeshi’ tune on this issue at election time. The actual, as opposed to potential, losers in the 1990s may have been many small-scale enterprises. They were hit hard by the credit crunch, which was part of the macro-stabilization policy. It may, of course, be

claimed that even within the broad framework of stabilization, some government policies, for example, those inducing transfer of savings to the equity markets, may have made access to finance more difficult for small enterprises compared to large companies. With the freeing of bank lending rates and the fiscal concessions for deductibility of interest costs that the corporate sector enjoys, the interest-rate structure has become more regressive, to the disadvantage of the unorganized sector. In general, there has not been much political backlash against reforms and no serious pitched battles (as opposed to occasional rhetorical skirmishes) have been fought on the issue of liberalization. Many state-level political leaders, irrespective of which party they belong to, have supported liberalization. If not for any other reason, simply because it has been associated with a more open-door policy for foreign investment, providing a way out of fiscal bankruptcy. The lack of serious opposition to reforms has sometimes been interpreted as evidence of lack of substantive reforms, because reforms are not supposed to be painless. This view is not quite correct. A more plausible view, as exposited, for example, by Jenkins (1997), is that there has been a great deal of piecemeal reform through a political process of diffusing resistance on part of the vested interests in various ways, without causing massive political confrontations. Like the Stealth bomber, reform in India has largely avoided the political radar screen. This process of diffusion of resistance may be illustrated by referring to the three major forms it has taken. First, while some large business houses have lost on account of increased competition from new (often mediumsized) business groups, particularly at the regional level (providing a new constituency of reforms), 7 the former have gained elsewhere as restrictions to entry in some sectors (earlier reserved only for public enterprises) have been eased. Thus, the potential opposition from large business houses has been muffled. Second, there has been a diffusion of resistance through regional fragmentation. As power has shifted more to the regions (indicated not just by the prominence of regional parties in power-brokering, but also by the increasing effective autonomy of the regional wings of national parties from the directives of the central party leadership), some regional governments, backed as they increasingly are by regional capital, have looked the other way when pre-existing restrictive rules have been breached or not effectively enforced. The opposition to non-implementation of

existing laws has thus been splintered. This has happened, for example, in the case of opposition by labour unions to lockouts by owners of industrial firms or the non-enforcement of Section 25 of the Industrial Disputes Act, under which government permission is needed to sack workers. These are instances of a kind of reform by default. The third is the case of reform by stealth or creeping reforms, as in the case of a slow chipping away at restrictions without causing much of a political splash. For example, in December 1997, the asset limit for small industries was multiplied fivefold (from Rs 6 million to Rs 30 million in terms of the value of plant and machinery), even though the number of products exclusively reserved for these small industries has not declined very much. Similarly, in some states the rules for acquisition and conversion of land for private industrial projects are allowed to be manipulated (evading the restrictive urban land ceiling laws), in the process generating a great deal of illicit income for politicians and promoters. The monopoly power of large public-sector companies has been chipped away by backdoor privatization on a small scale, or by allowing industrial firms to have captive power plants or coal mines (or allowing them to import if the domestic public enterprise fails in its supply commitments). Reform by stealth has been especially important in the case of labour laws. These laws, particularly those relating to job security and automatic promotion, are on paper among the most stringent in the world. Several attempts to change these laws have faced enormous opposition, difficulty and delay, much to the despair of reformers. Yet in practice, employers have often got away with many changes, as follows: 1. Many workers have been pushed out under the so-called voluntary retirement scheme with or without legal compensation, and few have been retrained or redeployed. 2. There has been widespread use of contract or casual labour, substituting for regular employees, sometimes through job or task redefinition. 3. Many unviable units have actually been closed through various subterfuges (in fact, the average number of days lost due to lockouts now far exceeds those due to strikes). 4. There have been many cases of subcontracting work out to small-scale units or backward areas, where the enforcement of the existing laws is also lax.

While there are large elements of truth in the position thus taken by Jenkins (1997) and others, I happen to disagree with this position on some major points. Diffusion of resistance through regional fragmentation is limited on important issues of restructuring at the national policy level, where vested interests are nationally organized. For example, in the case of restructuring the management of large public enterprises at the centre and giving them real autonomy (not just the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of MOUs in the past or the ‘navaratna’ or ‘mini-navaratna’ status proposed currently); or in breaking the unholy nexus between the public-enterprises hierarchy, their private clients and the criminal underworld and their political patrons; or in restructuring the insurance sector, or in the internal organization of public financial institutions; 8 or in reducing family control over large private-sector enterprises. Similarly, the practice of looking the other way while labour laws get diluted, may not be enough to attract foreign investors who may insist on more tangible guarantees. In general, reforms, if they remain clandestine, may strain credibility in the medium and long run. The staggering burden of government subsidies, and placating various powerful interest groups, shows how many crucial political-economy issues remain unresolved. A detailed study by the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, reported in Srivastava and Sen (1997), provides a fairly comprehensive estimate of the explicit and implicit budget-based subsidies. 9

According to this estimate, the budget-based 10 subsidies of the central and state governments taken together amounted to about Rs 1.14 trillion, which is 14.4 per cent of GDP (or about twice the size of the aggregate fiscal deficit) in 1994-95. This study computes subsidies as the excess of providing a service over the recoveries from that service (excluding defence and general administration). If one also excludes expenditure items like primary education, public health and sanitation, flood control and drainage, roads and bridges, soil and water conservation, agricultural and scientific research, and many social welfare schemes, and concentrates on what the study (not quite accurately) calls ‘non-merit goods and services’ (a large part of which go to the non-poor), the total estimate of such subsidies alone amounts to Rs 1.04 trillion, or 10.9 per cent of GDP in 1994-95. Then there is the colossal public debt, servicing which takes up a large and increasing part of budgetary funds, moving inexorably towards an internal debt trap, and keeps the interest rates high, choking private

investment. 11 The interest payments of the central government on the public debt as a proportion of GDP rose from about 3 per cent in the mid1980s to 4 per cent in 1990-91, and then to about 5 per cent in the mid1990s; the fiscal deficit of the consolidated public sector (including the central and state governments and non-financial public enterprises) as a proportion of GDP declined slightly from about 12 per cent in 1990-91 to about 10 per cent in 1995-96. A large part of this was the revenue deficit (used primarily for government consumption), which as a proportion of GDP does not show any decline. This deficit increased steadily over the 1980s, and then after a decline in the first two years of ‘adjustment’ (199193), went up significantly. It is likely to go up again after the hefty upward revision of wage and salary scales of government employees at all levels. This revision was implemented following upon (and exceeding) the recommendations of the Fifth Pay Commission (and its usual chain reactions for other public services at the central and state levels); at the mere hint of a strike by the central government employees, the government capitulated. The budgetary problems are severe, particularly at the state level, where the governments, exposed as they are more closely to some of the particularistic interest groups, are practically bankrupt in many cases. 12 The revenue deficit of the states has trebled over the 1990s so far. In some cases, ‘development grants’ for capital projects authorized by the Planning Commission are being used by the states largely to pay salaries to public officials. An increasingly larger share of the central loan to the states is utilized to repay earlier loans , and the states’ aggregate outstanding loans to the centre were nearly Rs 1.5 trillion by the end of financial year 199697. Circumventing the constitutional ceiling on market borrowings by state governments, the state-owned enterprises are issuing bonds with state government guarantees (generating large contingent liabilities) whose outstanding level nearly quadrupled over the first half of the 1990s. And yet a chief minister celebrated his election victory by announcing that the farmers, a large and powerful lobby in his state, do not have to pay for irrigation water or electricity. In many other states as well, water and electricity are provided at throwaway prices (as are higher education and urban transport), much below even the operational and maintenance costs of the facilities, not to speak of the capital cost. In 1994–95, the gross electricity subsidy of all states for the agricultural sector alone exceeded Rs

100 billion. In 1996–97, the annual commercial losses (excluding subsidies) of the state electricity boards were more than six times what they were in 1985–86, and their combined rate of return is now estimated to be a negative 16.5 per cent. There is a growing sense, in some quarters, that bankruptcy and the diminishing transfers from the centre 13 will eventually make the states awaken to the hard reality and the pressing need for reform. Attempts are afoot, for example, to restructure the operations of the state electricity boards in a few states (like Orissa and Andhra Pradesh). As states are increasingly asked to fend for themselves and as interstate competition to lure private investment heats up, this game is clearly to the advantage of the infrastructurally already better-off states. What is less clear, however, is how the Indian federal system will resolve the tension between the demands of the better-off states for more competition, and those of other states (which a weaker centre can ill afford to ignore politically) for redistributive transfer through constitutional bodies like the Finance Commission or extra-constitutional agencies like the Planning Commission. Can, for example, a shaky coalition government at the centre, dependent on MPs from infrastructurally weak states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh, ignore their redistributive demands to compensate them for losing out in the interstate competition for private investment? Such bailouts are likely to give wrong incentives in resource mobilization efforts by these states. On the whole, one should not exaggerate the extent of shift in the basic political equilibrium in spite of all the impressive changes that have taken place in economic policy. About fifteen years ago, I had described a system of political gridlock in India, originating in the collective action problems of a large, heterogeneous coalition of dominant interest groups with multiple veto powers, and with no interest group powerful enough to hijack the state by itself; the system thus settled for short-run particularistic compromises in the form of sharing the spoils through an elaborate network of subsidies and patronage distribution, to the detriment of long-run investment and economic growth. Since then, there has certainly been an increase in the diversity, fluidity, and fragmentation in the coalition of dominant interest groups. The industrial scene is less dominated today by a few big business houses, with the rise of medium-sized and regional business groups (particularly in textiles, sugar, cement, steel, chemicals, and

fertilizers in western and southern India) providing competition and conflict. 14 The rich farmer families are diversifying their investments and often branching out into private trade and commerce, real estate, transport, and small industry (particularly in sugar and rice mills, food processing, etc.), and as such are not averse to expansion of opportunities and easing of government regulations in the urban sector. There is also a discernible change in the mindset of large sections of the elite regarding the limits of the role of the state. There is a low, and at times grudging, acceptance within the bureaucracy that the Indian state has overextended itself in the economy, far beyond the limits of its administrative capacity. Some of the new entrepreneurs, belonging as they do to the families of senior bureaucrats, army officers and other members of the professional classes or sharing ties through education in elite engineering and business schools, have forged new links between the bureaucracy and private capital. Regional governments have much stronger links with regional capital now. Furthermore, most members of the dominant coalition, families in the industrial and professional classes in particular, but also some rich farmer and trader families, have now some close or distant relatives among non-resident Indians; a larger interaction and communication with foreign countries has helped thaw some of the antiquated, hard, autarchic attitudes. Meanwhile, the ideological props for pervasiveness of state control and regulations that the left intellectual community used to provide have been crumbling with the precipitous decline of state socialism in different parts of the world. All these changes and realignments in the composition and attitudes of the dominant coalition have made some of the deregulatory reforms more acceptable than before. But, as we have mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, one should not underestimate the enormity and tenacity of vested interests in the preservation of the old political equilibrium of subsidies and patronage distribution. Matters are further complicated by the evolving democratic forces, unleashed in an extremely hierarchical and heterogeneous society. This political sociology of reforms and its implications are discussed in the next section.

III

Along with political power drifting from the centre to the regions, there is an associated drift towards the backward and lower castes. This is clearly a sign of democratic progress in an unequal society. The numerical strength and increased assertiveness of some of the historically subordinate groups have compelled the upper classes and castes to form downward alliances and brought to the fore political actors from backward communities and regions. These players may be uninitiated in the etiquette of parliamentary democracy and in the social graces of modernity, but are quite astute in pursuirig the interest of their constituencies (and, of course, their own selfinterest). This victorious march of democracy in India with all its banality and gaudiness would have impressed Alexis de Tocqueville (1835), who had described the turmoil in 19th century Europe generated by rising democratic aspirations in a highly unequal society. What is disturbing, however, is that the diminishing hold of elite control and the unfolding of populist democracy to reach the lower rungs of the social hierarchy have been associated with a loosening of the earlier administrative protocols and a steady erosion of the institutional insulation of the decision-making process in public administration and economic management. It is now common practice for a low-caste chief minister in a state to proceed, immediately upon assuming office, to transfer civil servants belonging to upper castes and get pliant bureaucrats from his or her own caste. Many members of the supposedly independent civil service now try to curry favour with politicians to avoid transfers to undesirable jobs and locations. Administrative appointments outside the main civil service, like those to the boards of public-sector corporations, particularly those under state governments, are often used as political sinecures to keep the clamouring factions happy. What all this does to the institutional independence of economic decision-taking bodies or the credibility of commitment to long-run developmental policies is anybody's guess. There is a certain nonchalance in the rampant corruption among politicians in the newly emergent groups. Lower-caste leaders, when they come to power, are sometimes quite unapologetic about being corrupt. They say that the upper castes in control of the state have been corrupt for decades, and now it is their turn .’ 15 Corruption is thus seen as a collective entitlement in an amoral game of group equity. No major political party in India is opposed to the strong movements demanding large caste quotas in public-sector jobs and higher education for

backward castes, in addition to those stipulated in the Constitution for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. As the expansion of the public sector over the years created more opportunities for secure jobs, and, not infrequently, for the associated extra, illicit income if the job was regulatory in nature, more and more mobilized groups in the democratic process have started using their low-caste status for staking a claim to the loot. All this points to a major disjuncture between politics and economics in India so far as market reform is concerned. On one hand, we are told that in recent years the era of market reform has arrived in India, and that there is a measure of political consensus that it is inexorable and irreversible. On the other hand, some of the major political events in the last decade or so that have captured public imagination constitute a phenomenon that is essentially anti-market: the propagation of group equity and caste rights, the carving of markets for new jobs in the public sector in protected niches, special dispensations, and patronage for newly emergent groups, rampant caste-based violations of the institutional insulation of economic governance—all amounting to a drowning of considerations of efficiency in the name of intergroup equity. 16 Cynics may even argue that the retreat of the state implied by economic reform is now more acceptable to the upper classes and castes, not only because the regulatory and interventionist state has become too burdensome for the Indian economy, but also because these classes and castes are now losing their control over state power in the face of the emerging hordes of lower castes, and thus opting for greener pastures in the private sector (and abroad). This is a rather extreme (though interesting) hypothesis. It is certainly consistent with the fact that very few substantive reforms have yet been attempted in the agricultural sector 17 —a sector where appropriate reforms would have benefited the backward and lowly castes in massive numbers. 18 It is also consistent with the fact that public enthusiasm for reforms is largely confined to the upper classes and the English media—say, the top decile or so of the income structure, which for some reasons is called the ‘middle class’ in India—and even the most avid reformist politicians find it necessary to tone down their reform rhetoric at election time, when they have to face the unwashed masses. There may be larger political-philosophical issues involved here. Many economists assume that market liberalism and competition is the natural order of things, and its unfolding in India has been blocked all these years

only by our intellectual elite's socialist infatuation. It is not usually appreciated that Indian political culture may have a dominant anti-market streak that will not easily disappear, even if that supposedly imported infatuation fades away. Our collective passion for group equity, for group rather than individual rights, and the deep suspicion of competition in which the larger economic interests are given an opportunity to gobble up the small, work against the forces of market and allocational efficiency. This is not surprising in a country where the self-assertion of newly mobilized groups in an extremely hierarchical society takes the form of long-suppressed, group-specific expression and of clamouring for protected group-niches, where small people (small and middle peasants, selfemployed artisans and shopkeepers, bazaar merchants and petty middlemen, clerks, school teachers and service workers) constitute an overwhelming majority of the population, and their ranks are swelled by the inexorable demographic pressure and by the traditional inheritance practices involving subdivision of property. Gandhiji had given sensitive and eloquent expression to this anti-market, anti-big capital, small-isbeautiful populism and mobilized it in the freedom movement against the British. Some other strands that grew out of our freedom movement, whether it is the ideas of Savarkar on the right (emphasizing community pride), or on the left, those of Lohia (stressing lower-caste self-assertion against the Westernized upper castes) or of Communists focusing on class mobilization—none of these ideas are overly concerned with individual rights 19 —also put a premium on group equity and dignity rather than individualist liberalism in the public sphere (even though the Indian vision of spirituality is often deeply individualistic). In recent decades, those bearing the legacy of the Gandhian moral critique of market expansion and competition have joined forces with those espousing the left critique of capitalist exploitation of workers, peasants, and other small people and their rights over resources, in building active grass-roots movements all over the country for the protection of the environment, of women's rights, and of the traditional livelihood of the indigenous people. In this growing movement, ‘development’ or ‘market’ has almost become a dirty word, synonymous with dispossession of the little people and with despoliation of the environment. Major strands in the Indian political culture thus provide a none-too-hospitable climate for market reforms, and, contrary to the wishful thinking of many economists and journalists of the Indian ‘pink press’, the

process of economic reforms is not likely to be smooth sailing for quite some time to come. The prospects for more reforms are not bleak, but one should not underestimate the scale and nature of opposition.

Notes 1 . On the other hand, with imperfect competition, trade liberalization may increase the perceived elasticity of demand facing each firm, lower its mark-up, and increase output. The domestic market for Indian firms is, however, often regionally segmented, reducing the impact of national-level competition. 2 . The capital expenditure of the central and state governments taken together as a proportion of GDP declined from 8.3 per cent in 1990-91 to 5.7 per cent in 1995-96. 3 . A report of the Internal Group on Small Scale Industries in the Planning Commission in 1997 observes that capacity utilization in this sector is only around 50 per cent, and one of the main factors responsible for this under-utilization is the inadequacy of credit. 4 . Nagaraj (1997) refers to the significant rise in profitability (gross profit as percentage of capital employed) of central government public-sector enterprises in the 1990s in general, and in the plant load factor of thermal power plants in particular. 5 . The threat as yet is largely exaggerated for the corporate sector as a whole—a comparison of the Business India 100 in 1995 with the listing in 1978 suggests that the predominance of Indian business houses remains about the same. This is particularly the case in asset holdings. Foreign firms’ share in fixed asset formation in the corporate sector remains at about 10 per cent in the 1990s, as can be seen from estimates of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). 6 . For example, a company like Bajaj (whose chairman has been one of the most vocal in demanding restrictions on foreign investment) has been losing market share largely because it does not use its own R&D, while its competitors have their own design and development units. 7 . In any case, the regional business groups knew that the major beneficiaries of the old licensing system were the national big business houses. 8 . There have, however, been significant, though slow and halting, financial sector reforms. These include the deregulation of interest rates, more competition in the financial sector, insistence on capital adequacy norms in most public-sector banks, etc. The ‘non-performing assets’ as a proportion of their total advances have now been brought down to below 20 per cent. 9 . This includes, apart from explicit cash subsidies (e.g., on food, fertilizer and export), interest on credit subsidies (i.e., loans given at below-market rates), tax subsidies (e.g., tax exemption of medical expenses, deduction of mortgage interest payment from taxable income, etc.), in-kind subsidies (e.g., provision of free medical services), equity subsidies (investment in equity in state enterprises yielding low dividends), procurement subsidies (say in government purchase of foodgrains), and regulatory subsidies (administered pricing). The estimate, by its method of computation, includes the effects of cost overruns, wastages and inefficiencies on capital projects, and thus goes beyond the usual meaning of subsidies.

10 . This estimate excludes an off-budget subsidy like petroleum subsidy, which in 199495 was about Rs 66 billion (by 1997 the ‘oil pool deficit’ climbed to more than three times that amount). 11 . Recently, the finance ministry had a formal agreement with the Reserve Bank giving the latter a great deal of autonomy in the matter of monetization of the public debt. This illustrates that the Indian state is more sensitive to the short-run political dangers of inflation than to the long-run costs of choking investment. 12 . In Uttar Pradesh, for example, debt servicing is now more than the tax revenue of the state. 13 . The total net transfers from the central to the state governments (i.e., the states’ share of central taxes, and loans and grants to the states less interest and amortization of loans) fell from more than 6 per cent of GDP in 1990-91 to 4.7 per cent in 1995-96. 14 . The composition of the list of the top twenty business houses has changed substantially in the last twenty-five years, with the entry of many new business houses and the exit of some old ones. Some of the regional business groups are now quite influential, in business lobbies like the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at the national level. 15 . For a similar observation, see Visvanathan (1997). 16 . It is arguable that intergroup equity may sometimes serve the cause of dynamic efficiency. To the extent special preferential policies for groups are supposed to cope with a historical handicap, their economic rationale may be akin to that behind the ageold argument for infant-industry protection in early stages of industrialization. Some disadvantaged groups may need temporary protection against competition so that they can participate in learning by doing and on-the-job skill formation before catching up with the others. Some of the standard arguments against infant-industry protection are then equally applicable to job reservation policies. For example, the ‘infant’, once protected, sometimes refuses to grow up; reservations, once adopted, are extremely difficult to reverse. Another argument against infant-industry protection is that even when the goal is justifiable, it may be achieved more efficiently through other policies. For example, a disadvantaged group may be helped by preferential loans, scholarships, job training programmes and extension services for its members, instead of job quotas that bar qualified candidates coming from advanced groups (in other words, equality of opportunity may be more justifiable than insistence on equality of outcome) . Such indirect policies of helping out backward groups are also less likely to generate political resentment (particularly because in this case the burden may be shared more evenly, whereas in the case of job quotas the redistributive burden falls on a small subset of the people in advanced communities). 17 . The major reason for this is, however, the inflation-sensitivity of the Indian polity. Substantial agricultural reforms will involve removal of controls on trade, which is likely to raise the price of major foodgrains that domestic consumers pay and the price of some raw materials (like cotton). Politicians of all parties are worried about the immediate consequences of such price rises, whatever their long-run benefits for producers may be. Indian farm lobbies (with the exception of some sections, e.g., those under leaders like Bhupinder Singh Mann or Sharad Joshi), are also not yet very active in demanding such reforms; they may be worried that the dismantling of the existing structure of food, fertilizer, water and electricity subsidies in exchange for receiving international

agricultural prices may be too complex and politically risky a deal. In any case, since 1991, the ‘disprotection’ of the agricultural sector, in terms of relative intersectoral prices, has gone down considerably. 18 . The question has also been raised why, as the backward and lower castes are coming to acquire more political power, one does not see major reallocation of public expenditure on projects like health, education, housing, drinking water, and other development projects from which they would gain the most. Instead, their leaders are often preoccupied with symbolic victories—like littering the countryside with Ambedkar statues, or, as anecdotes have it, keeping upper-caste officers standing while the lowcaste chief minister remains seated in the only chair kept in the office. To this, one may respond and say that this probably is just a matter of time. These social and political changes have come to North India rather late; in South India, where such changes have taken place several decades back, it may not be a coincidence that there has been a lot more effective performance in the matter of social expenditure. This reflects the fact that in South India there has been a long history of social movements against exclusion of the lower castes from the public sphere, against their educational deprivation, etc., in a way, more sustained and broad-based than in North India. One should also not lose sight of the fact that the upper-caste opposition to social transformation is somewhat stronger in North India, as demo-graphically, upper castes constitute a much larger percentage of the population (for example, in UP and Bihar) than has been the case in most parts of South India. So new political victories of lower castes in North India get celebrated in the form of defiant symbols of social redemption and recognition aimed at solidifying the victories, rather than in committed attempts at changing the economic structure of deprivation. 19 . The leader who carried in him the tension between individual and group rights was B.R. Ambedkar, a constitutional lawyer who was also a major spokesman of an oppressed group.

References De Tocqueville, A. 1835 (1954). Democracy in America . New York: Vintage Books. Jenkins, R.S. 1997. ‘Democratic Adjustment: Explaining the Political Sustainability of Economic Reform in India’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex, UK. Nagaraj , R. 1997. ‘What has Happened since 1991? Assessment of India's Economic Reforms’, Economic and Political Weekly , 18 November. Srivastava, D.K. and T.K. Sen. 1997. Government Subsidies in India . New Delhi: National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. Tendulkar, S.D., K. Sundaram and L.R. Jain. 1996. ‘Macroeconomic Policies and Poverty in India: 1966-67 to 1993-94’. Report submitted to the South Asia Multidisciplinary Advisory Team, International Labour Organization, New Delhi. Visvanathan, S. 1997. ‘Gujral's Red Fort Doctrine’, Economic and Political Weekly , 32 (38), 20 September: 2378-79.

PART III

8 The Decline of the Moderate State RAJNI KOTHARI The liberal conception of democracy contained in it a certain view of the relationship between state power and society. It was a view based on moderation and restraint in the use and abuse of power, its wide diffusion across various segments and ‘interests’, and its balancing through negotiated settlement of conflict and cleavages. Though in its pristine formulation (never fully realized in practice), this took the form of a competitive interplay of interests in a free ‘market’, as the liberal polity was consolidated, it was through a set of institutions that its operating culture was crystallized. And it was through the formulation of a set of legal and political norms and conventions, and ‘rules of the game’ in regard to their application, that the institutional framework was legitimized. As a result of this legitimacy and authority of the institutions, the play of power was widely accepted and its excesses and concentration checked. Such an institutionalized pattern of political behaviour proved crucial in containing and channelizing the other major consolidation during the same period of history—the modern national state conceived as a social institution. The very processes that put an end to the ancien rgime in various regions of the world also gave rise to a new conception of the state as a social institution. Among these were: the expansion of the base of political participation, extension of the reach of the state to cover economic tasks that were hitherto performed by diverse ‘estates’, and the emergence of the state as a mediator—indeed, an arbiter—in conflicts arising out of divisions based on class, and on ethnic and nationality factors.

New Conception of the State

Underlying this new conception of the state have been three critical shifts in the structure of the relationship between power and society in the modern age. First, there emerged a territorial ‘centre’ in each major juridicalpolitical entity around which identities were built, with which political affiliations (of various ‘peripheries’ and ‘sub-centres’) were structured, and which became the primary source of legitimacy. Second, the new state centre became the authoritative core of the emergent political form everywhere, namely the nation, defining both its internal and its external boundaries. Third, as the state centre began to extend towards the peripheries and the lives of the people in its attempt to deal with economic and social affairs and to ‘manage’ diverse forms of conflict, there emerged the phenomenon of mass society with its inherent tendency towards homogenization and standardization. In turn, this led to continuing expansion in the functions of the state and paved the way for its increasingly managerial and bureaucratic as well as mercantilist 1 and welfare orientations. Reinforcing (and in some ways greatly accentuating) these three basic tendencies—of centralization, of nationalization and of the strait-jacketing of social differentiations into a mass society—has been the external role of the national state. This has forced the state to close ranks and insist that its various constituents fall in line, to become the only legitimate spokesman of each nation in a world of nations, and, with this aim in mind, to build itself up into a national security apparatus in order to defend the integrity of its borders, its economy and its culture. The greater the perceived threat to this security, the greater the reliance on force and military strength, with a potential hardening of state arteries and a closing in of the open spaces between the state and the citizenry. It is largely through the consolidation of democratic institutions in crucial countries, and generally the power of the democratic impulse everywhere, that the convergence of all these factors into the all-encompassing impact of the modern state has been held in check. It is still (and perhaps increasingly) a difficult task given the power of technocratic and corporate structures everywhere, and given the pressures generated by the age of mass politics, now a global phenomenon. It is not surprising that in large parts of the world, liberal democracy, faced by internal turmoil and external challenge, Or simply through the opportunism, fickle-mindedness or vainglory of leaders, has been overwhelmed. Indeed, what is surprising is

that despite such a confluence of historical forces, liberal democracy continues to survive both as a form of human governance and (even more) as a value system that continues to remain steadfast for millions of people. In fact, it continues to gain new adherents in all parts of the world, including those who, at an earlier period, had categorically rejected it. The imminent struggle of the whole period since the rise of the modern national state is between the totalitarian tendencies inherent in the statist thrust of a mass-based democracy and the libertarian spirit inherent in the same democratic ideology. It is a struggle that is now entering its most critical period with the elite of most democratic societies losing their original impulse towards moderation in the use and dispersal of power, and, faced by the challenge of unprecedented politicization of the masses, succumbing to the temptation of using populist postures as a means of political survival. These issues become all the more pronounced and intensified, as well as highly complicated, in the case of culturally plural societies. 2 I want to discuss, in detail, this specific configuration of the problem stated above. I shall first consider the problematique in the form of a set of questions, and then deal with them with particular reference to India.

‘Development’ and Democracy in Plural Societies There is as yet no adequate theory on the growth and decline of democracy in multicultural societies. The closer democracy gets to the roots of such societies, the more pulverized it becomes and the more alienated the operating elite becomes, as well as less able to deal with multiple polarities and increased demands from the grass-roots. Ironically, the more the socioeconomic assumptions of democracy become realizable, the less the system is able to ‘aggregate’ demands in a meaningful manner, leading it to a politics of postures instead of a politics of performance—in reality, a politics of deceit—forcing it to take recourse to authoritarian short cuts, and when this does not work, to the sheer politics of survival. A whole series of issues demand close and serious probing. 1. Is it inevitable that in multi-ethnic and plural societies the effective political community is restricted to the dominant structures of both class and ethnic type, virtually treating the peripheries as subject populations and colonies? Examples are: Athenian democracy; modern Western

democracies, as they become multi-ethnic as in the USA, or as their politics become effectively multi-ethnic as in the UK and Canada; above all, large parts of Africa, South East Asia, and, of course, India. 2. How far is it possible to respond to the demands of the lower classes in a liberal polity that has no access to external colonies—is ‘internal colonialism’ a substitute for external colonialism? 3. How does the class factor operate in a multi-ethnic society? 4. Then there is the question of poverty and economic development. According to the received wisdom of development theory based on liberal internationalism, a cushion is provided for poor societies which lack adequate generation of surplus from within by mobilizing external resources through aid, soft loans and long-term credit, preferential trade agreements and transfer of technology. (The liberal polities of the West also had access to external resources, but that was through a long stretch of colonialism and its in-built transfers.) But has it not transpired that these transfers of resources have only exacerbated the problem of internal disparities and inequities, and of internal colonialism with respect to regional, ethnic and class peripheries? 5. There is, further, the whole issue of ethnicity and class. Cultural and ethnic pluralism is not a serious problem for liberal democracy so long as the political community is limited to the upper and middle strata, and so long as democracy means a politics of accommodation and cooptation. It is only when politics moves into a mass age, when, in short, ethnic differences take on a class or neo-class character, that the problem becomes serious. It is against this background that the phenomena of radicalization at the bottom and authoritarianism at the top, with the left and ‘radical’ parties either disappearing or becoming part of the dominant structure, have to be perceived. 6. The transition from an inter-elite political community (that is restricted largely to the upper and middle strata) to a mass society also highlights the changing nature of caste. Democratic politics becomes the great catalyst in the transformation from a rigid caste hierarchy to a competitive structure of rival coalitions, politicizing large parts of the social system and rendering it capable of a whole series of accommodations, and, on that basis, of an expansion of the base of the political system. If this process politicizes the lower strata without, in fact, providing institutional channels for challenging elite hegemonies

—through, for instance, a massive process of compensatory legislation and redistributive politics on the basis of caste 3 —conflicts rooted in caste and communal identities begin to operate outside the institutional space and become unmediated, direct and violent. 7. The same is true of regional disparities. Since these are generally uninstitutionalized, there is little hope of correcting them. The net result is a colonial relationship, as can be seen in ‘backward’ regions (or backward segments of prosperous regions or entire states within a federal system) in large parts of the Third World. 8. Faced by these myriad cultural expressions of the political process, the political elite resorts to populist and plebiscitary politics and a gradual undermining of both institutional intermediates and (in the larger polities) the federal structure of governance and communication. After this, all that remains is charisma and its direct appeal to the masses. With this, mass society becomes the purveyor of an authoritarian polity and a captive state structure. Such a resort to populist politics and commensurate operating style of the top elite (and their local dependants) also escalates tensions in other fields—in the politics of religious minorities especially, but also in other areas, such as the politics of language and regionalism. The temptation to play loyalty games with these most sensitive of all ‘peripheries’ (social more than economic) grows, and this disrupts the long-term process of working out a multi-religious and multiracial polity through the normal expansion of opportunities and resources. It also exacerbates local community tensions and undermines factors which work for cohesion and integration. 9. In time, all of these processes of tension-generation and the decline in the mediating role of politics sow seeds of disaffection, parochial separatism and ultimate disintegration. This can only be halted by resort to more and more repression, by transforming issues of social management into problems of law-and-order and ‘security’, and by increasing the incidence of violence, both horizontally (intercommunity) and vertically (between the state and the people). Yet, as all of this occurs against the background of the heightened consciousness and politicization of the lower strata and peripheral communities, there is persistent resort to populist gimmickry and emotional appeals of the most abstract kind, such as external threat or the threat from internal

opposition. This may carry conviction for a while, specially under unusual circumstances like a war or an assassination, but not for long. 10. Such politics of populist pretence also destroys inter-elite consensus and the political process based on certain minimum rules of the game. No polity can survive without an authoritative elite that shares minimum values and goals. Populism destroys both the role of the people and the role of the elite. 11. The point is that distributive justice also has to be institutionalized, just as are liberal freedoms and concepts such as equality before law. There is nothing automatic about either the institutions of parliamentary democracy or economic growth leading to distributive justice. It has to be deliberately built into the design for national development, and into the nature of the state structure. 4 Failing this, liberal freedoms too would go under, at any rate for large sections of the people. ‘Equality’ then becomes an empty slogan which is used to take away the freedoms that exist, instead of providing benefits to the poor, raising their hopes, and, on that basis, gaining their loyalty and their votes. 12. On the other hand, such a system, based as it is on an ideology of justice without its institutionalization, generates pressures from the educated and semi-educated classes, and relatives of various influential people. These pressures strain the state apparatus well beyond normal bounds of efficiency, and draw into it a large lumpen element that then becomes a drag on the exchequer. Thus arises the parasitism of the urban middle classes. 13. In Western democracies, the limitations of a liberal polity have been overcome by building a welfare state and a democratic version of corporatism through the public sector. This has inherent difficulties in a state structure that is lacking in a well-grounded apparatus and traditions that safeguard it against private encroachments and corrupt practices. Here, both welfarism and developmentalism become instruments of a burgeoning state for the benefit of the prosperous and powerful. Planned development in such a state also reinforces existing disparities and injustices. Education, health, the cooperative sector—all become arenas of malpractice, deprivation and destitution while the state apparatus goes on getting bigger and bigger. 14. The same applies to forms of struggle and conflict from below which have elsewhere resulted in powerful movements of deprived people, the

working class, the peasantry, and so on. In the West, at a comparable time in the past, this had induced in the democratic process a strong social and economic content—all the way from the base of society and the floor of the economy up to the national level, in course of time transforming the nature of the state and the structure and composition of the elite. There too, the democratic process has, of late, suffered inroads, under the impact of corporate capitalism keen on cornering economic surpluses, of global militarization and of a new technocratic drive that is common to both and is displacing the political process by a managerial and technocratic ethos. And yet the earlier gains are not all lost. In large parts of the developing world, the task is far more difficult —to integrate a far-flung polity that also happens to be divided by barriers of language, ethnicity, religion and caste. All of these things prevent the ‘state’ from becoming a ‘nation’. Instead, it becomes identified with the government and the ruling group. Fundamental rethinking is called for in respect of the very structure and constitution of the state in such multicultural, multilingual and virtually multinational societies. Equally radical thinking is called for in respect of the proper territorial framework within which the struggle for justice, democracy and social transformation is to be waged. 15. Important global tendencies have reinforced this decline in the liberal state and democratic values in the developing countries. There is taking place a strange convergence of local elite aspirations in the Third World and international efforts at co-opting sources of challenge to domination and exploitation. One of the most important vehicles of this convergence has been militarization of Third World societies. Meanwhile, many of the slogans which originated in the Third World have also been adopted as part of an international strategy. Examples include ‘basic needs’, ‘self-reliance’, ‘alternative strategies of development’—indeed, even the slogan of the new international economic order. This is being done to induce the developing countries into following a path of development that is less demanding of world resources, and, therefore, less disruptive of the prevailing international structure. 16. Alongside the militarization and the new doctrine of international development strategy (Michelena 1976), there has, of late, emerged a new doctrine of containment, arising out of the view that the standards

and lifestyles that have been achieved by the developed countries must be protected from any threats from the Third World, if need be by physical intervention in Third World regions. This new doctrine of containment ranges over a variety of strategies, from the co-opting of new centres of power in the world, to a strident ‘resource diplomacy’, to models of technology transfer that end up making these centres dependent on the North once again (indeed, highly indebted to it), to new doctrines of strategic ‘defence’ against real or potential challenge from the Third World. 5 All of these developments pose a serious challenge to both liberal and egalitarian movements in the Third World, with the result that the prospects for both freedom and equity there seems more remote than ever before, at any rate for the large masses of the people. 17. In institutional terms, this theory of development has given rise to a growing faith in centralized institutions. Subtly, both the liberal doctrine of a free society and the communist doctrine of a classless society have endorsed the role of a centralized bureaucracy for achieving social ends. During the very decades when participation has become the dominant value with people everywhere, in actual practice it has not meant much. The capacity of citizens to participate in the social process in the more developed nations has become severely limited because of the high degree of centralization of most institutions resulting from the growth of a technocratic state. In this, there is not much difference between formally democratic countries (at least most of them) and countries that avowedly believe in ‘democratic centralism’. As for the countries of the Third World, most of them have been subjected to authoritarian tendencies, in both domestic and international arenas, much of this in the name of development. It has been a period in which developmentalism has emerged as perhaps the most important reason of state. It provides a major doctrinal shift in the whole thinking on development. 18. Two other doctrinal shifts may be noted which will contribute further to this erosion of an ideological kind which is producing the phenomenon of marginalization of the poor and the dispossessed in large parts of the world. First, there has taken place a retreat from the earlier ‘theory of progress’ according to which the fruits of progress and modernization were to reach all people everywhere through the sheer

dynamics of capitalist growth and ‘development’. This is no longer the dominant mood in global think-tanks. It has been replaced by an accent on national and international security, assurance of resource flows, containment of demands from the lower strata of societies, from ‘social movements’ and from radical regimes, and holding terrorism and violence at bay through technologies of repression that are globally conceived and regionally executed. The alternative vision that is offered is of technologically efficient, ‘strong’ and powerful states that will take on the role of regional overlords and provide packages of consumption and lifestyle to a global middle class that will move stridently into the 21st century. In this model of a technocratic future, those that have no access to the new technologies and resources will have no place. They will be treated as disposable surplus, as waste and parasites. 19. The other doctrinal shift that is worth noting and is just beginning to take place, is within the strategy and technology of development. This is the shift from focusing essentially on industrial modes of development and their ‘infrastructures’, a phase of economic growth that relied on non-renewable sources of energy and took the modern factory as the typical prototype of production and management in centralized urban locations, to a renewed exploitation of the vast rural hinterlands of the South, their agronomies, forestry, dry and waste lands and new projects for extracting water, power and energy plantations, the prototype of which is to be ‘decentralized’ management of renewable natural resources. This emerging shift is in part a result of a new global economy of industrial surpluses and declining profits in factory-based output (textiles or steel or machine goods), in part of a longer-term shift of energy sources from petrochemicals and even nuclear energy to wood, solar energy and nitrogen fixation, and in part of changing consumption packages in the North calling for farm yields and feeds and labour-intensive, finely processed products that could be achieved through decentralized farming out of production in the so-called ‘informal’ sector. 20. This is leading to a new appraisal of traditional resources of land and forests and uncultivated and hilly interiors. And thence to a process of recolonization through policies of liberalization, privatization and acquisition of community resources like village commons, all of which can be more easily carried out in rural areas because they are in private

hands anyway and can be justified (and earlier restrictions on land ceilings, etc., got around) in the name of exports and new technologies like biotechnology and modernization of genetic resources. Overall, the period of ‘new technologies’ is going to be one of increasing power of the corporate sector and of the multinationals. 21. This, in turn, will gradually lead to reducing the role of the state and shifting power to private corporate hands. There is taking place a significant shift in the whole thinking on the relationship between the state and the bourgeoisie—from the early idea of the state ‘holding the ring’ and permitting the market to determine things to accepting a more positive role of the state following the growth of socialist and welfare ideologies, and in some of the developing countries, particularly the ‘newly industrializing ones’, a direct partnership between the state and the multinationals, given the fact that the local bourgeoisie was so weak, to the most recent penetration of the Third World and its incorporation in the world market during which the state is becoming an agent of global forces, accepting the model of liberalization and privatization and once again permitting the market to be the chief arbiter of economic interests. 6 22. With both the decline in the role of the state and the transnationalization of economic activity through a new technological drive, we may also see a decline of the era of mass politics. In part, this will be a consequence of the phenomenon of depoliticization and a general discrediting of ‘polities’, and in part a result of the growing marginalization of the poorer strata for which the ‘system’ will have no need in its march forward into the ‘future’. 23. And yet the fact remains that this is an era of mass awakening, of the growing assertion of ‘rights’ by submerged populations, of social turmoil at the bottom of societies. It is here that the democratic process in plural societies is entering its most problematic phase, with its very diversity producing new traumas. For the effort will be to transmit the new consciousness along communal, sectarian and fundamentalist lines, to transfuse nationalist ethos with a chauvinist fervour and to divert attention away from crying economic issues, channelizing both idealism and youthful passions and sentiments towards defending community interests and identities—either of the majority or of the minorities.

Once this happens, diversity degenerates into fragmentation, and the call for ‘unity at all costs’ becomes irresistible. 24. An important element in this perversion of the democratic process is the growing ‘communalization’ of electoral politics, till recently considered pivotal to civil liberties and the expansion of opportunities for the masses. With the growth of communal and ‘fundamentalist’ appeals, the tendency has been for the ruling coterie to consolidate its base by inducing deep anxiety among the masses about national unity and security and turn electoral battles into plebiscitary devices. Or for a still more chauvinist or Fascist force to overthrow the existing regime and install a more ruthless one in its stead through the electoral democratic process. 7 (There are enough precedents of this in history.) 25. All these developments are converging to produce a growing sense of threat to cultural identity and civilizational values—in Asia, in Africa, and, though in a slightly different and tortuous way, in Latin America— so that even the traditional defences of poor societies seem to be crumbling before their eyes. Their technological know-how is being eroded. Their traditional lifestyles and their sense of a shared heritage are being undermined. Their religious and cosmological springs of survival and change are being destroyed under the impact of the ideological framework based on the doctrine of modernization which originated in the West long ago, and whose latest incarnation is found in the theory of development for developing countries. 8

The Case of India There are in the whole world only a few societies in which, despite the powerful centralizing and homogenizing thrusts of the modern age, the state has been made into an instrument of human freedom and social justice . While each of these societies faces new threats to democratic survival, it is also true that in each of them there have been distinguishing and special reasons why it has been possible to moderate totalistic tendencies of the modern state. In the developing world, without doubt the leading example of such moderate statehood is that of India. I do not intend in this paper to go into the full genesis of the Indian case, nor into the basic cultural mores that have sustained such an evolution. I have done this elsewhere. 9 What I

propose to do here is to examine the special case of India as a moderate state and a democratic polity as it operated from 1947 (and in an attenuated form from 1975), to discuss the reasons for its decline, and to relate these to the challenges posed by the growing demands from a conscious citizenry for structural change which India's Westernized elite appears incapable of bringing about.

The Indian Model In order to make a realistic assessment, we need to bear two things in mind. First, when India came of age as a nation, it was heir to powerful humanistic traditions emanating from a dynamic interaction between the Western world and a reawakened Orient in response to the Western challenge. Dominant among the values that were imbibed as a result of this interaction were those of freedom and democracy, of national selfdetermination and self-reliance, of equality and social justice, of ‘service’ to the poor and to society at large—together synthesized in the Gandhian concept of swarajya . Second, as a matter of choice and volition, the Indian leadership undertook to follow a specific course of development for realizing these values without necessarily bearing in mind the full implications thereof. In a sense, this was just as well, for had the leadership anticipated all the consequences of its choices, it would not have dared undertake the bold and historic journey that it did. Some of the more seminal developments in human history have taken place because the catalysts and initiators of change did not anticipate the full consequences of their actions. This has also been the case with contemporary India. In the course of time, the model that was adopted gave rise to deeper mutations, uncovered issues that had not been fully apprehended, and brought forth a dialectic with which the ‘system’ cannot now cope. But it is better to move along and intervene in the process of history and face new challenges as they arise than to be too circumspect and steer one's course too timidly. 10 That the steps taken by the first-generation leadership were not timid or even circumspect is clear to anyone who recognizes the distinctiveness of the Indian model of development. It was a model based on the simultaneous pursuit of four basic goals: (a) national integration of an enormously

intricate and diverse social structure; (b) economic development for raising the standards of living of a people whose income levels had remained stagnant or had declined for over a century; (c) social equality in a society that for centuries had been based on the principle of inequality, and (d) political democracy in a culture that had valued authority based on status, hierarchy, and concentration of power in the hands of a small elite. Nothing like this had ever been undertaken anywhere on such a large scale. What is more, it was a design that represented a departure from India's own heritage of an apolitical, spatially diffuse, parochially structured, and hierarchically oriented social order. This heritage had important elements that facilitated the process of democratization. Yet it was precisely because of the leadership's proclivity to pursue such diverse goals simultaneously that it was able to tap the creative potentialities of India's rich heritage. India not only undertook to pursue all these tasks simultaneously, which itself was unprecedented, but also decided to make the democratic political process central to the whole enterprise and made the other major processes —of nation building, of economic development and of achieving an egalitarian social order— contingent upon the democratic process. By shifting the basis of right from inherited status to numerical preponderance, by raising the consciousness of the large and hitherto subject castes against the small and traditionally entrenched upper castes, by giving primacy to the secular element in caste and community relations as against ritualistic and segmental divisions, and thus by unsettling the antecedent structures of local tutelage and power, the democratic principle sought to transform a social structure which over the centuries had become rigid and ossified and had lost its inner vitality. These values, the institutions they nurtured, and the pragmatic political forms through which they were played out, provided the sinews of integration to a diverse, in many ways divided, and inherently plural and segmented social fabric. This was the greatest achievement of democracy in India, of building a unity which derived its strength from infinite diversity and differentiation and did not need to steamroll the country into some dead uniformity under a leader or a party or an idea. Indeed, by now the experience that India has had (including periods when it has strayed away from the basic model) is significant enough to suggest that only in this way could national integration be achieved, and that crucial to this mode of integrating India's vast diversity has been the democratic political system.

In what follows, I will examine the structural characteristics and operating culture of the Indian system.

The Congress System The Indian system crystallized around two seemingly opposite political and psychological pulls. On one hand, the need for consensus and cooperation was affirmed by all. A nation-building ethos emphasized the need for integration, specially with the forceful reminder of a long history of political fragmentation and disunity. At the same time, the uninhibited development of competitive party politics and its penetration at so many levels of the social and administrative hierarchy gave rise to a differentiated, highly varied structure of competition and dissent. This has since expressed itself in ever new forms by a large spectrum of social and political groups in opposition to the ruling groups. All of this has resulted in a unique style of nation building—a constant search for unanimity in a shifting structure of factions—which has in many ways been a continuation of the long Indian tradition of unity in diversity. It was from a very small and homogeneous (upper-class, Englisheducated) elite that the ruling class of India was formed, and it was from this ruling class that oppositional elements emerged. This situation was perpetuated by: (a) the length of dominance of the Congress party and the fact that the more effective opposition was carried out within the fold of the Congress and of the governmental and patronage structure to which it gave rise; (b) the process of selective assimilation in the Congress, through which leaders from other social groups have been co-opted into the framework of dominance; and (c) the socialization within the Congress of the men who challenged its dominance. There was a marked tendency towards accommodation by agglomerating various groups and subgroups into a loose and amorphous organizational structure, reflecting the cultural style of traditional Indian society. The result was a fragmented and amorphous structure of authority that bred even more fragmented opposition, which was often hard to distinguish from the coalition in power. This made it difficult to identify positions and demarcations; all entities seemed to dissolve into ‘the ruling class’. 11 At the same time, it should be remembered that the opposition was given an importance which was out of proportion to its size. 12 This, in turn,

helped sustain the morale and activity of the opposition in spite of there being slender chance of its coming to power. Also, certain prominent leaders of the opposition were given considerable personal importance by the ruling groups in the Congress (specially by Nehru), thus preventing frustration and bitterness from taking undesirable forms. This, in turn, created a wide gap between the leadership and the rank and file in the opposition, shielding and protecting the former from the radicalism of the latter. All this ensured the democratic and competitive character of the intellectual climate in which the party system developed in India, again setting it apart from the ‘one-party’ models of many other countries. The model of a one-party state was anathema to the Congress from the beginning. While continued dominance and a nationwide spread led to an impressive consolidation of power in the hands of the Congress, this did not lead to authoritarianism because of the free working of the electoral process, the crystallization of a factional structure within the party of consensus, the continuous pressure exercised by the opposition, and the general tendency of the leadership to preserve democratic forms, to respect the rule of law, to avoid undue strife and to hold various elements together in some sort of a balance of interests. In the development and consolidation of the Congress as a party of consensus, a wide variety of agitational politics was preserved, and any suggestion of imposing an authoritarian model of the party system in order to avoid dissidence and preserve unity was categorically rejected. The ‘one-party dominance’ as found in India was based on consensual authority and not simply on civil or military power. 11

Legacy from the Premodern Period Such a relationship between power and plurality, between dominance and dissent, has drawn upon basic traits in India's history and culture. The striking thing about India's historical culture is the great variety and heterogeneity that it has encompassed and preserved. This is owing to many reasons: the diversity of ethnic and religious groups that have come in succession and settled down; the eclectic rather than proselytizing style of spiritual integration characteristic of Hinduism; the absence of either a unifying theology or a unifying and continuous secular tradition; and above

all, a highly differentiated social system that has brought functional hierarchies, spatial distinctions and ritual distances into a manifold frame of identifications and interdependence. The result of all this has been a continuous pattern of coexistence between diverse systems and lifestyles, persistence of local subcultures and primary loyalties, and an intermittent, unstable, and discontinuous political centre. Many of these patterns are, of course, new, and have been crystallized through various political structures in India's modern Constitution: the party and electoral system, the federal system of politics and administration (down to the districts, blocks, and villages), the legislative forums, and the caste and communal configurations underlying politics. But, although these forms arose relatively recently in India, the fact that they were so quickly legitimized (and in some measure institutionalized) can be explained only by reference to its long tradition of diversity and dissent, adaptation in the face of challenge and continuity through change. 14 Responding to such a crystallization, there emerged a very large number of social and political organizations at all levels, pressing the government and the dominant party for participation, resources and recognition, as well as for specific policy changes and administrative actions. The chief vehicle for the exercise of such pressures was the party system, either through the factional network within the Congress party or through pressures from outside, exerted individually or through other political parties. Furthermore, as the elaborate group structure of the Congress party reflected almost all shades of opinion and interest, there quickly developed a series of structural relationships between oppositional groups outside the Congress and corresponding factions within it (Kothari 1961; Morris-Jones 1969). This role of the opposition in structuring the internal operation of the ruling party was a peculiar feature of the Indian system for a long time. It enabled the Congress to remain in power because the party was periodically undergoing change and alternation in parliamentary and governmental personnel. It also led to a sense of efficacy among opposition parties, despite their thin chances of assuming governmental power for almost twenty years. At the same time, dissidence within the dominant party continued and often found easy outlets because of the multiparty nature of the opposition outside the Congress. It was the availability of such dissidence that ultimately caused anti-Congress coalitions to crystallize in

various states after the fourth general elections held in February 1967, and at the centre of the polity after the Emergency. Such a model of horizontal aggregation was, in turn, based on a deliberate strategy of vertical disaggregation . By this is meant the role of intermediate elite in settling disputes and generally deciding most issues at lower levels, not permitting these to aggregate upwards, thus shielding the centre from parochial pressures and local conflicts. This was the most important aspect of the evolution of a moderate centre in India. 15 Through all of this, the party system contained and modified the centralizing tendencies inherent in planned development and in the bureaucratic consequences of the Westminster model of government. The Congress made mobilization of the public in economic and nation-building tasks a function of political participation rather than of bureaucratic control and ideological rigour. With the passage of time, this model opened up, brought new groups and parties into positions of power, led to a widening of the national consensus and a chastening of doctrinaire and volatile sections within all parties, and made power the great moderator in politics. It is this system that operated in India, despite periodical strains, for two decades and more.

Erosion and Decline Such a model of democratic nation building was bound to produce contradictions in the very process of working itself out, slowly generating major mutations in the social fabric. It was in the social arena that these mutations primarily took place, essentially because of the continuous operation of an open political process, giving to the traditionally deprived communities a sense of power and a consciousness of their rights under the system, and leading to a gradual challenge to traditional privileges and hegemonies. The content of such striving was not just political. It entailed, first, the demand for economic restructuring and redistribution of resources and opportunities. Second, it entailed a redefinition of social status and a challenge not just to the power of the economically rich and privileged and the traditional caste hierarchy, which were no doubt the most important. It also entailed a challenge to the overarching bureaucratic-managerial apparatus that obtained at higher levels and to the elite that controlled the various sectors of the

establishment, specially in the administration, higher education, the judiciary, and the law-and-order machinery.

Challenge from the Bottom Now such a challenge to established privilege was only to be expected in a model of development that was based on the politicization of social diversity as an inherent feature of its dynamic thrust. 16 Unfortunately, while this was accepted as inherent in India's approach to nation building, the leadership failed to relate institutional and programmatic means to this eventuality, with the result that before long the institutions and programmes became static and vacuous and failed to restructure social reality. As this happened, they became instruments of privilege and concentration of power rather than of equality and broad-based participation. Thus, the means adopted by the leadership for the basic task at hand— namely, the removal of poverty, unemployment and disparities in levels of living—tended to concentrate attention on achieving overall growth rates through the laying out of a considerable infrastructure for development and the building of a modern nation. The leadership hoped that as all this spread and seeped downwards, everyone, including the lowest rungs, would be able to participate in the national endeavour and benefit from it. No systematic effort was made to ensure that this would in fact happen . Distributive justice was not built into the nation-building design and the development model. 17 Such a model of economic development was persuasive for groups that stood to benefit from it and identified national prosperity with their own. These groups included not only the commercial, industrial, financial and management segments of the capitalist structure and the upper peasantry in the rural areas, but also a very wide spectrum of lower-middle classes which was accommodated through a vast expansion of the middle and lower rungs of the state apparatus. It is this latter, on the whole unproductive and lumpen class of people, who have become a continuous drain on the national exchequer and have greatly contributed to the inefficiency of the governmental process and hence of the economy. A model of development that failed to give productive employment to the educated classes ended up by making parasites of them.

Response from the Top In this lies the root of the politics of populism and of the pressures for an all-providing state. A framework of economic development which fails to provide consciously for a steady, even if modest, expansion of opportunities for all results in reinforcing the demand component of the political process and gradually discounting its affiliative component. And in the hands of a leadership that is unable to disaggregate demands through a diffuse and decentralized framework of governance, this leads to a politics of premature promises as a device to deal with basic inadequacies in policies and a steady decline in the performance of the system. Such a method of misleading and disorienting a public that has come to expect results soon begins to be looked upon as an exercise in deceit and leads to a fast deterioration in the legitimacy of the system. In turn, the managers at the centre of the system seek to deal with restlessness and alienation of the public by recourse to increased coercion and repression. This is exactly what has happened in India over the last decade or so. Centralization, which may have been once thought of as an instrument of purposive interventions by a cohesive and disciplined elite, soon turns out to be a strategy of mere survival based on a deliberate withdrawal from lower levels of the system, and leads to a breakdown of the party system and the federal structure and of wider affiliations that were built through them. It also produces a growing load on the centre and expectations from it precisely when it has lost the capacity to make the diverse elements in the system deliver the goods. Failure to deliver the goods in a period of growing expectations points to a need for basic structural changes in the system, but instead produces a politics of postures, a purposely diffuse populist rhetoric aimed at the poor and the dispossessed, dramatic overtures to socialism (which boil down to nationalization and state ownership) and an avid assertion of developmentalism as the principal raison d'être —in short, a new genre of statism according to which the fate of the socially deprived and the destitute rests securely in the hands of the state and a strong central authority. This leads to a political style that seeks to establish a direct link with the masses and evokes symbols of solidarity and blind trust in charismatic leaders, and, in turn, underrates the importance of intermediate institutions and mediating structures.

In the years following the Congress split in 1969, the new operators all but dismantled these mediating structures and greatly weakened the intermediate buffers between the centre and the various peripheries. As the political system failed to stand the test of performance that the new leadership had itself invoked, it ended up in directing public discontent more and more upwards—from party and other functional agencies to the government, and ultimately from a large spectrum of national and regional elite to the prime minister. The result was that when the end came in March 1977 (when the Congress was dismissed from power at the centre for the first time), there was little to fall back on by way of a framework of power linking various levels of institutions. The Janata Party, itself put together almost overnight, stepped into this massive vacuum. It did little to fill it, of course, and in fact wasted a unique opportunity to build a truly federal and decentralized structure of power and authority, bolstered by necessary policy correctives to fulfil people's expectations and channelize them towards a new pattern of development. What it sought was to adopt a series of measures aimed at economic decentralization. In the absence of a commensurate political structure that could implement these measures, such an approach boomeranged as it first bolstered the power of dominant interests (upper peasantry and ascendant castes in the rural areas) and then provoked a counteroffensive on the part of established metropolitan interests which succeeded in defeating the new politics and destabilizing the regime. In fact, the years of the Janata, as of the Congress (I) before and since (which too has from time to time resorted to economic palliatives), have all painfully exposed the dangers of a centralized polity seeking to control a political process that had produced a restless and impatient electorate, given rise to wide-ranging social conflict, and made the performance of the government the principal basis for legitimacy. A centralized polity is inherently incapable of dealing with such challenges; what it does is to aggregate discontent and direct it all to the central apparatus of power instead of dealing with it at various levels and in a disaggregated and decentralized manner. It is equally unable to deal with the backlash from established interests in the form of atrocities against the poor and the weak and resort to settling conflicts outside the institutional framework, by the use of money power on one hand and muscle power on the other. A centralized polity is also ill-equipped to deal with centrifugal and divisive

forces and leads to a sense of alienation among the ‘peripheries’. Under the circumstances, resort to force is the only means left to deal with strife and challenge which are inherent in a democratic polity. Nearly all the theoretical issues that were posed in the preceding section hold true in the Indian case.

The Opposition Contributing further to the culture of populism and an exaggerated emphasis on the centre of the system has been the political stance of the opposition in India. There has been an increasing tendency of the opposition to subordinate other goals to the simple aim of displacing those who happen to be in power. As a result, while there is considerable consensus on fundamentals, there is great structural and organizational fluidity, with a consequent erosion of political authority and a decline of its ‘majesty’. The ambiguous concept of democracy lends justification to a shifting structure of loyalties, wholly distorts the factional interplay of individuals and groups (which worked until a larger framework of the party system persisted) and leads to constantly shifting coalitions against the ruling group which the public is increasingly unable to identify with. This then leads to a scramble for power and visibility among leading figures, each vying with the other for public attention. The same grounds provide stimulus to competition in mounting agitations with the simple aim of removing those who happen to be in power. 18 As democracy entails both representative and plebiscitary connotations, it lends justification to populist strands (including mob actions) and weakens the salience of constitutional means in the expression of protest.

A Crisis of Institutions Such a process of decline and erosion of institutions places too great an emphasis on personalities, their sense of personal security and their attempt to use the public realm as an arena for resolving personal crises. In India, the last several years have witnessed precisely this. It has been a period of rapid erosion of institutions. There has been too much stress on leadership , too little on institutions , their integrity and autonomy. This has not only led to a sharp erosion of both effectiveness and morale in crucial segments of

the state apparatus—the party system, the parliament, the bureaucracy and law-and-order machinery, the judiciary—and a corresponding increase in arbitrariness and in highly partisan and reckless interventions by political upstarts. Much worse, it has led to a systematic neglect of the public realm and a tendency to treat power as a means of personal aggrandizement, and the state as an instrument of patronage and profit. 19 Once this happens, the whole fabric of the polity becomes petrified, any claim to the loyalty and commitment of vital segments arouses indignation, and the deeper springs of nationhood begin to dissipate. Eventually, this leads to a breakdown of authority. This is the basic crisis facing India: institutional erosion in the face of massive change. The distinctiveness of the Indian model of nation building, which had set it apart from most other Third World societies, lay in its ability to build a powerful institutional structure which ordered and moderated individual drives and ambitions—a unique party system, a rulebound administrative and judicial structure, a non-partisan planning machinery, a large network of autonomous institutions and voluntary bodies operating at various levels, and a plural basis of informed criticism and debate. Culturally and historically too, Indians have shown a remarkable capacity to order their plural identities and their considerable ideological ambiguity by resort to a well-laid-out operating hierarchy based on formalized rules and conventions. The Indian secular tradition had permitted considerable ideological fluidity, but it had always laid emphasis on an ordering mechanism. This was carried over into the modern period by conceiving the nation state as such an ordering mechanism, a new all-India cultural tradition based on the ideas and the ideals of the new intelligentsia on which the Indian National Congress and the new state were based. The orderly growth of the first two decades owes itself to this institutional factor. This has since been dissipated. In a way, this was inherent in the process of change. A particular institutional apparatus in course of time proves to be a drag and an obstacle to social change. It needs to be overhauled and changed. By the late 1960s, the Congress system, the colonial bureaucracy, the rule-enforcing and adjudicating machinery and the planning apparatus had all become too rigid and too conservative to permit new social formations to emerge and produce a just and humane society in the face of massive demographic, social and psychocultural shifts. It called for a change in the operating framework.

In a sense, Mrs Gandhi's struggle with the ‘Syndicate’ and the ‘Grand Alliance’ at the end of the 1960s signified this tension in India's historical process. Unfortunately, she did not follow up her decisive victory in this struggle by a new institutional strategy. Disruption of a given institutional framework may be necessary for building a new polity, it cannot be an end in itself. One must come forward with a new institutional model. Lenin, Gandhi and Mao did precisely this. In a way, Nehru did the same, building partly on Gandhi's legacy and partly on new thinking based on his own reading of the role of the Indian state in the modern world. This cannot be said of most other Third World leaders. This, then, is the central issue that faces India in working out a transition to the next phase of nation building. In seeking to absorb the dynamics generated by social change engendered by the democratic political process, the new Congress leadership under Mrs Gandhi adopted a style that threw the old institutional order out of gear, but was unable to replace it by a new structure. It was, instead, replaced by an increasingly personalized and plebiscitary politics on one hand, with a tendency to overlook and in effect undermine institutions and traditions and parochialized politics on the other, with a tendency to negotiate political and economic issues with local potentates rather than an all-India elite. The basic thrust of the erstwhile Indian model was to create a unified system that was, however, sensitive to the social reality of a highly dispersed and decentralized society, and which permitted quite a large role for voluntary effort outside the state sector. It was a model for building unity by drawing on India's innate diversity, something that emerged out of a given population and land mass with a highly voluntaristic ethos. This was possible largely because of the continuous presence of a unique party system, which ensured that the centralizing thrust of both the ideology of development and the bureaucratic apotheosis inherent in the Westminster model 20 were moderated by pressures from below and imbued with a culture of accommodation and consensus. With the decline of the party as the basic institution of the system and its displacement by the bureaucracy on one hand and personal charisma on the other, the system has entered a period of crisis.

A Crisis of Values

This was one aspect. No less important was the nature of leadership and its capacity to instil in the system a set of values, norms of behaviour and rules of the game. The role of Gandhi in providing a pace-setting personal example and diffusing moral standards based on indigenous symbols and identities is well known. This was followed by Nehru, who personally shaped the post-Independence political system, provided it with a set of basic norms and values which he constantly reiterated in his role as the nation's schoolmaster, and enabled the system to bear the loads of an expanding framework of political participation, economic and social mobilization, and open competition and criticism. But Gandhi also created dozens of smaller Gandhis, and although Nehru lacked Gandhi's talent of self-reproduction and freedom from any sense of insecurity, and Patel did not live long enough, several Nehrus and Patels came into being under the system of which Jawaharlal Nehru was only the chief operator. All over the country, outstanding individuals came to the fore and provided a dominant style of leadership for a considerable length of time. Their word was law, they consolidated political machines encompassing large territories on the basis of support networks they built, penetrated a wide array of both traditional and developmental institutions and constantly mediated in disputes and differences. But, above all, they imbued politics with an ethical code and imparted to it the concept of ‘service’, of duty, of the Gandhian emphasis on dharma . Central to the moderation of state power is this insistence on a larger ethical code without which politics is bound to degenerate into a cold and cynical exercise in control and manipulation, and ultimately its takeover by musclemen and mafias. This is what has happened over the last few years. 21 In the ultimate analysis, Gandhi was right that politics and religion are closely intertwined. Either the state is an instrument of morality, or it is made into an instrument of some positivist force, be it progress or national glory or the glory of a person who is supposed to personify the destiny of the whole people. Whenever the state is shorn of the moral imperative and the nuances and controls that go with it, it becomes totalitarian—no matter what its legal constitution be.

The Moral Dimension

There is need to return to some of these larger issues. For they are among the central questions of our time. They were very much part of intellectual reflection, study and discourse a few decades ago. This has since been discounted in the preoccupation with the so-called ‘scientific’ study of politics—at a time when, in fact, the ground has been slipping from under most societies, traditional sanctions against the exercise of power are disappearing, and cultural and ethnic identities are being rapidly eroded. It is, therefore, not surprising if in large parts of the world there is a revival of interest in religious identities, and often a religious revolt against the modern state. In many ways, this is a reflection of the growth in consciousness of the masses as spiritual disciples of some great messiah. This is precisely the problem posed by the Islamic resurgence from Morocco to Indonesia, the incipience of religious militancy in other regions and the nativistic revulsions to modernization found in several Third World countries. Here, perhaps, lies India's distinctive role in working out a transition towards its own version of a postmodern, post-secular society. Steeped in the tradition of social pluralism discussed above (as distinct from the mere political pluralism found in Western democracies) and in a conception of unity based on dispersed identities and shared values, endowed with a nontheological religious pedigree without a fixed doctrine or an official clergy, and given its high tolerance to ambiguity and a deeply ingrained tradition of scepticism, India may be better placed than most societies to carve out a niche for itself in a world undergoing great transformations. Its real test will lie in its capacity to contain the centralizing impacts of the modern positivist age, and specially in its capacity to moderate these impacts in the political sphere where the spectre of populism threatens the very survival of institutions and values. There are many indications that out of the present struggle between a centralized and increasingly repressive state and various movements of protest and defiance based on local organizations of the poor and ethnic minorities, peasants’ movements and movements for regional autonomy and decentralization of power may emerge an alternative formation that will prove more sensitive to India's indigenous cultures, its great diversity and essentially decentralized character. Its being a predominantly rural society with great reserves and tenacity against the homogenizing thrust of both modern statehood and the modern economy may help in this. So its

penchant for a larger ethical code that restrains and moderates the exercise of power. 22 This confrontation between centralizing and decentralizing thrusts, which is being waged in various regions as well as nationally (and, in respect of the larger forces at work, internationally) is, at the moment of writing, producing a massive backlash from powerful interests, both in the economy and the polity, both in the countryside and in the metropolitan areas, against the forces of change and reconstruction of the polity. But it appears that the issue has been joined, and though things are likely to get worse before they get better, the ground forces at work cannot be put down for long. Much will depend on how effectively those among the middle classes who feel committed to the values of a liberal democracy and a just social order will throw their weight behind the forces struggling for an alternative political order, and in the process save the country from both internal atrophy and eventual disintegration. This has been the main proposition of the ‘left of centre’ intellectual tradition of India—a convergence of interests between democratic governance, but also in conceiving such knowledge and opinion making in terms of service to the people, sacrifice of privileges and allurements provided by the system, and identification with the victims of history and with the democratic movement waged on their behalf. Each of these are difficult demands on a social class that has been used to abstract itself away from the people, has always had access to privileges which it has considered its rights , and has usually identified itself with the flow of history, not its refuse. And yet the struggle for humane governance in an era of technocratic regimes and computerization of the human mind must build on the values and commitments of this very social class. For it alone can reverse the prospect of dispensability into that of indispensability. And on that basis recreate the human enterprise.

Notes 1 . It is true that the physical—and, to an extent, juridical—consolidation of the state took place through the ancien régime . But this was more in the nature of a territorial unit, and, in the case of the maritime powers, a mercantile power. Internationally, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) legitimized the modern nation state. However, the role of the state as an entity that intervened in settling rival claims to authority as between different classes or estates—first between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and later between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—is largely a development after the French Revolution

on one hand and the Industrial Revolution on the other, and the worldwide expansion of European power and ideology. 2 . Again, many of the builders of the ancien régime pursued either mercantilist or bureaucratic conceptions of the state; the maritime powers in the first case and Germany and Russia in the second. What is distinctive of the modern nation state is its adoption of these roles as integral to the very conception of the state, as a generalized doctrine and not a result of some ambitious or imaginative ruler (Frederick the Great in Germany, Catherine the Great in Russia, emperors of the Thang dynasty in China). 3 . This should be distinguished from the conception of political pluralism as found in the analysis of Western democracies. 4 . The most outstanding case of correcting historical injustices on ethnic lines is that of the bhoomiputra movement in Malaysia. In India, such a politics was successfully conceived by Devaraj Urs, the erstwhile chief minister of Karnataka. For a detailed documentation of this, see Manor (1980). 5 . For a critical posture on international development strategy, see my Report on the UN Symposium on a New International Development Strategy, held at Scheveningen (The Netherlands), July 1979, UN Document. 6 . For a historical review of the changing perception on the role of the state in capitalist development, see my ‘NGOs, the State and World Capitalism’ in Kothari (1988). 7 . For a detailed analysis of the use of electoral and democratic politics for ‘communal’ ends, see my ‘Communalism: The New Face of Indian Democracy’. (Kothari 1988). 8 . The issue is dealt with at length in the paper ‘State and Nation Building in the Third World’ (Kothari 1988). 9 . See Kothari (1970), chapter on ‘political culture’. 10 . These and the following points were developed in Kothari (1980). 11 . These points were first developed in Kothari (1993). 12 . Morris-Jones was the first to draw attention to this fact. See his Parliament in India (1957). 13. The full model of this party system was developed in two stages: ‘Party System’ (Kothari 1961) and ‘The Congress “System” in India’ (Kothari 1964). For a schematic presentation, see W.H. Morris-Jones (1969). 14 . All these points have been developed in detail in the paper, ‘Why Has India Been Democratic?’ (Kothari 1988). 15 . This was first developed at length in Kothari (1970). 16 . This point has been forcefully presented in An Agenda for India (New Delhi, 1980, third edition), a ‘crisis of change’. The term was first mooted by Ahmed (1979). 17 . For an early critique, see Frankel (1969). 18 . These remarks are not limited to non-Congress parties. They apply equally to the Congress. Indeed, the extent to which Mr Sanjay Gandhi resorted to agitational methods, including use of violence and gangsterism in embarrassing the administration, the courts and Janata leaders, beat all records of opposition tactics in Indian politics. At the state level, the Congress in opposition resorts to all manner of coercive tactics, often with the tacit approval of leaders at the centre.

19 . See Kothari (1975), For a fuller statement of the diagnosis presented here, see Kothari (1976). 20 . Morris-Jones happens to disagree with me on my view about the Westminster model. My own critique is developed in Democratic Polity and Social Change in India (1976). Morris-Jones’ dissent with my position was expressed in the first Indo-British meeting held in Delhi in 1978 and published in Future of Democracy (New Delhi, 1978). 21 . 1 have candidly laid out what has happened in a recent article, ‘Where Are We Heading?’ (Kothari 1981). The full paper of which this article was a shorter version, ‘Democracy and Fascism in India’ has been published in Kothari (1988). 22 . For a comprehensive documentation on the grass-roots movements and the debate among them on an alternative polity, see the literature coming out from Lokayan, a national forum for dialogue and debate among social activists and intellectuals. See the various issues of Lokayan Bulletin , 13 Alipur Road, New Delhi-110054.

References Ahmed, Bashiruddin. 1979. ‘The Crisis of Change’, Seminar , October. Frankel, Francine. 1969. ‘Democracy and Political Development: Perspectives from the Indian Experience’, World Politics , 30 (3); 448-68. Kothari, Rajni. 1961. ‘Party System’, Economic Weekly , 13, 3 June. ———. 1964. ‘The Congress “System” in India’, Asian Survey , 4 (12), December. ———. 1970. Politics in India . Boston: Little Brown. ———. 1975. ‘The Failure of a System: Politics as Private Enterprise’, The Times of India , 10 April. ———. 1976. Democratic Polity and Social Change in India: Crisis and Opportunity . Bombay: Allied Publishers. ———. 1980. ‘India: An Assesment’, Vikram Sarabhai Memorial Lecture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Mimeograph. ———. 1981. ‘Where Are We Heading?’, The Indian Express , 20 November. ———. 1988. State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance . New Delhi: Ajanta Publications. ———. 1993. ‘Oppositions in India’, in Robert A. Dahl (ed.), Regimes and Oppositions , New Haven: Yale University Press. Manor, James. 1980. ‘Pragmatic Progressives in Regional Politics: The Case of Devaraj Urs’, Economic and Political Weekly , 15 (5, 6 and 7), Annual Number: 201–13. Michelena, Jose A. Silva. 1976. ‘Issues in Comparative Analysis of Development and Underdevelopment’, in Rajni Kothari (ed.), State and Nation Building: A Third World Perspective . Bombay: Allied Publishers. Morris-Jones, W.H. 1957. Parliament in India . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1969. ‘Dominance and Dissent’, Government and Opposition , 14 August.

9 Centralization and Powerlessness: India's Democracy in a Comparative Perspective ATUL KOHLI During the 1970s and 1980s, a recurring pattern characterized political change in India: control over government decisions tended to centralize in leaders who ruled by virtue of personal popularity, but who found it difficult to transform their personal power into a problem-solving political resource. A number of political consequences typically followed. Governmental legitimacy became hard to sustain; there was a high leadership turnover below the highest ranks; the state continued to perform at a low level of efficacy (in terms both of accommodating conflicting interests and of solving developmental problems); and political violence as well as poverty continued to dominate the political landscape. This paper attempts to explain the roots of the simultaneous tendencies towards centralization and powerlessness in India's low-income democracy. It is argued that such tendencies towards centralization and powerlessness are generated by the near-absence of systematic authority links between the state's apex and the vast social periphery. In years past, specially during the 1950s, India's nationalist party, the Congress, forged patronage links with those regionally and locally influential, thus creating a chain of authority that stretched from the capital city to villages. Over the last two decades or so, these links in the authority structure eroded owing to a number of forces. The spread of democratic politics undermined the influence of regional and local traditional elite, and the nationalist party-qua-organization was destroyed by intra-elite conflict and by the recalcitrance of power-hungry national leaders.

Given India's plural diversity, the erosion of both traditional authority in the social structure and of the nationalist party created a highly fragmented political society. Leaders with populist and personal appeal offer one ready mechanism for forging a modicum of political coherence in such a frequented political situation. Once in power, however, populist leaders do not readily perceive the need to build political institutions; rules and procedures of such institutions as parties only put limits on the discretionary power of personalistic leaders. Without parties or other political institutions, however, the links between leaders and their supporters remain weak. Elections are won on general, non-programmatic promises, and it becomes very difficult to translate such general mandates into specific policies. Major policy decisions repeatedly evoke considerable opposition, even from former supporters, and, just as repeatedly, governmental initiatives falter. Policy failure in turn paves the way for other populist challengers, thus perpetuating the cycle of centralization and powerlessness. The argument developed here with reference to India may also be of some general relevance. First, India is one of the few developing countries that has sustained democracy for nearly fifty years. Political patterns within it may thus help analyse what is likely to happen in other low-income democracies over time. One insight of possible general relevance is that the spread of democratic polities in pre-industrial societies undermines domination between traditional ‘superiors’ and ‘inferiors’. As this happens, struggles of domination and opposition emerge from localized, social arenas and enter the national political sphere. One should then expect difficulties in forging new and coherent patterns of national authority. Such a political context, in turn, encourages the emergence of leaders who rule by personal and populist appeal. More often than not, however, personalistic rule of this nature is likely to lead to disappointing results. Without parties and programmes, populist leaders promise too much and are capable of delivering little, specially to the bottom half of the population. The problem of forging coherent authority thus continues. Besides Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in India, this analysis may also apply to such other recent cases as Cory Aquino in the Philippines or Garcia in Peru. The second general point worth noting at the outset concerns how this paper's approach relates to other prevailing ones. The issues raised here are similar to some of the earlier concerns of Samuel Huntington (1968: Ch. 1) insofar as the problem of centralization and powerlessness is an integral

aspect of the imbalance between institutional development and mobilized demands. The causal analysis, however, is different. Instead of conceptualizing mobilization primarily as a function of socio-economic change, this paper conceives of growing political activism as additionally resulting from the spread of democratic politics. 1 This modification enables one to understand considerable political activism, even in fairly lowincome, pre-industrial settings. Moreover, because power-hungry national leaders in India have destroyed or inhibited institutional rebuilding, those who control the state are not viewed here as necessarily the agents of political order and the public good. Finally, this paper emphasizes the mutual interaction of the state and society—the ‘recursive relationship’—which neatly complements that proposed by Joel Migdal (1994). On one hand, the centralizing and populist antics of India's national leaders are not comprehensible without situating them in the larger socio-political context, specially at the regional and local levels. On the other hand, the changing societal context of growing authority fragmentation cannot be understood without reference to how India's democratic and interventionist state moulds the incentives of local and regional actors. In the first of three parts, I analyse the recurring tendency in contemporary India towards the emergence of centralized and personalistic rule. The second part discusses the reasons why personal, concentrated power, while enabling leaders to block the access of others to the state, does not readily translate into developmental efficacy. The conclusion investigates the consequences of this recurring tendency towards centralization and powerlessness, as well as some of the broader implications of the Indian materials. (I should note at the outset that the empirical materials for this essay build on some of my other research; details of the Indian materials may be found in this larger body of work [Kohli 1987, 1990a, 1990b]).

The Recurring Tendency Towards Centralization By ‘centralization’, I mean control over key national decisions in the hands of a very few (or even a single) of the political elite. Understood as such, India has always been a fairly centralized democracy. Even during the 1950s and the 1960s, control over important decisions was highly concentrated in Jawaharlal Nehru and those close to him. Nevertheless,

important contrasts between India of the 1950s and 1960s, and India of the 1970s and 1980s, help define the analytical problem I seek to explain. To simplify a rather complex picture drastically, levels of political mobilization in India during the 1950s and the early 1960s were relatively low, and elite politics tended to accommodate intra-elite struggles. While Nehru was definitely the ‘first among equals’, the fact is that cabinet government during this early period was a reality, the parliament functioned as an important deliberating and debating forum, the opposition was treated with respect, the Congress party had internal democracy and an identity independent of the government, chief ministers of states often possessed independent political bases, and such other state institutions as the Constitution, the civil service and the judiciary enjoyed a degree of nonpartisan integrity. There were, thus, important institutional checks on the personal power of Nehru. It is also important to recognize, however, that political struggles in this early stage primarily involved a relatively small group of the elite, specially nationalist and other wealthy urban and rural elite. The large majority of the Indian population, specially those in villages, were not as yet actively mobilized political actors. Members of dominant castes and other influential ‘big men’ in villages were thus often able to sway the political behaviour of those below them, namely, the middle and lower rural strata. As these rural elite were incorporated into the fold of the Congress party via patronage links, India's democracy took on the appearance of a relatively well-constructed, elitist democracy in which competing elite managed to work with each other, and into which the elite professed a hope of actively incorporating India's masses. Political changes over the next two decades present an intriguing paradox: the more the power relations in the social structure (specially in the villages) were democratized, the more personalized and centralized became decision making at the top of India's political pyramid. Can these two processes of change be conceived to have been systematically linked? Before such a case is made, the fact of growing centralization needs to be documented briefly. Specialists on Indian politics should agree with the broad observation that from the late 1960s onwards, decision making in India became more and more centralized in the person of Indira Gandhi. The old Congress party was marginalized and the new Congress party of Indira never became a real party. Indira Gandhi, instead, won considerable popularity by adopting a

populist posture and by establishing direct links with the masses. In turn, she used this popular electoral base as a power resource to make key political appointments. More and more individuals, both in the party and in the government, were appointed rather than elected to power. Issues of personal loyalty and favouritism thus became crucial in this top-down political system. Over the 1970s and the 1980s, nearly all members of the cabinet, the parliament as well as the Congress party officials and chief ministers of states lost their political autonomy; these positions came to be filled by those deemed loyal and useful by Indira Gandhi. As challenges to such personalistic use of power grew, the civil service and the police were also politicized. Eventually, even the armed forces and the Constitution were not spared from partisan political struggles. How does one interpret this trend towards growing centralization in the person of Indira Gandhi? One line of analysis views it as a product of an intra-elite conflict that Indira Gandhi won, partly because of her manipulation skills, and partly because of her populist appeal to India's numerical majority, the rural poor. This victory, the argument would continue, was then used to create a top-down political system to preserve and enhance Indira Gandhi's personal power (Brass 1990). Such an argument is not wrong, but is incomplete. It is not wrong in the sense that a leader with greater vision, and a greater sense of the public good, would have realized that such a ruling strategy would not only weaken democracy but would also, over the long run, prove self-defeating. As discussed later in this section, when Indira Gandhi needed institutional support to implement her programmes (having destroyed the institutional base of the state), she found the state's arms rather limp. Programmatic failures, in turn, contributed to her political decline and to her tragic assassination. The emphasis on power-hungry Indira Gandhi is incomplete, however, because other Indian leaders have also ended up creating a very similar personalistic, centralized, and top-down political system. For example, Rajiv Gandhi sought to reverse these trends after coming to power in 1985, but by 1989, gave up any such effort as quixotic and re-established a personalistic, highly centralized regime (Kohli 1990a: Chs 11 and 12). As important are other examples from several Indian states. Non-Congress leaders, such as the actors-turned-politicians M.G. Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu and N.T. Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh also failed to institutionalize their power. They concentrated power in their persons, appointed loyal

minions to positions of power, and continued to rule as long as their personal popularity could be maintained. The wider prevalence within India of a tendency towards centralization and personalization of power suggests the following. Certain broader political forces in contemporary India encourage the rise of leaders who rule by virtue of personal popularity and who, in turn, following the logic of personal rule, tend to concentrate power and create top-down systems staffed by dependent appointees. These forces came into play sometime in the 1960s, and over time their significance has grown. Stated baldly, the lower-middle and the lower strata of rural India emerged during the 1960s as independent and significant political forces. The less these groups were swayed by leaders of the so-called dominant castes, the less electoral utility was served by the old Congress system of a chain of influential ‘big men’. As a clever politician, Indira Gandhi sensed this political change rather early, and facing power competition from rival elite, quickly shifted her energies into re-aggregating the newly released political forces. The populist slogan of ‘Alleviate Poverty’ was aimed precisely at winning electoral majorities in an increasingly fragmented political society, where the traditionally influential were losing their influence. Indira Gandhi's repeated electoral successes further confirmed this hypothesis. The large majorities she won in turn freed Indira Gandhi from coalitional responsibilities and enabled her to create a top-down state system. Numerous local examples from India's political hinterland buttress the claim that, from the 1960s onwards, India's political society became more and more fragmented. I will cite only three empirical cases, and those only very briefly, from three different parts of India (Kohli 1990a: Chs 3–7). The first example is from Kheda district in the western state of Gujarat. Well into the 1960s, the politics and society of this area were controlled by the landowning dominant castes of the Patidars (the Patels). Even though the Patidars were a numerical minority (some 20 per cent of the local population), their power rested both on control over land and on a relatively high position in the caste hierarchy. Over time, a heterogeneous middle group, the Kshatriyas (who constituted nearly 40 per cent of the local population) slowly awoke to the possibility that their numbers could be translated into political power. The more these ‘backward castes’ were mobilized as an electoral bloc, the more their leaders wanted to control the local state—for both symbolic and direct material rewards (patronage) that

control of a local state provides in rural India. Unfortunately for the Kshatriyas, the old, undivided, district-level Congress, as well as local government offices were dominated by the Patidars well into the 1960s. The resulting political conflict thus posed a fairly classic question of democratic politics: How were the Congress’ national leaders (like Indira Gandhi) going to incorporate the support of numerically significant groups like the Kshatriyas, while local party and governmental structures were controlled by hitherto dominant groups like the Patidars? A second example is from Guntur district in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The dominant community in the 1950s and the 1960s in this area was of the Reddys, who often competed for power and influence with another landowning, relatively high-caste community, the Kammas. As long as power conflict was limited to these two elite castes, the old Congress often succeeded in incorporating rival elite. Over time, however, here as elsewhere in India, the capacity of Reddy and Kamma leaders to sway the political behaviour of the backward and Scheduled Castes declined. This became clear in the 1960s as many of the old Congress leaders (like a significant national politician, Sanjiva Reddy, who had opposed Indira Gandhi within the Congress) started losing their electoral support. The challenge to the power of the dominant castes was not as dramatic in Guntur as it was in Kheda. Nevertheless, it was becoming clear throughout the 1960s that ‘backward castes’ would need to be incorporated on a new basis by any leadership seeking their support. Segments of the rural poor in this area had, in any case, been successfully mobilized by the Communist Party of India. How was the new Congress going to respond to these growing power challenges? The third and most dramatic example of growing power challenges is provided by India's eastern state, West Bengal. Always more susceptible than other parts of India to radical appeals, in the 1960s, parts of the state experienced quite a few radical movements. The well-known Naxalbari movement in the north of the state successfully organized tribal peasants for confiscation of land, till it was brutally repressed. Less dramatic, but probably more threatening, was the fact that the political significance of the old bhadralok elite (the Bengali intelligentsia, with a base in land wealth) declined, both in cities and in the countryside. Simultaneously, the Congress’ capacity to win elections declined. As various communist parties gained in significance, the same political question emerged at the forefront:

How was a new national leadership of the Congress going to re-aggregate electoral majorities in a political context of growing power challenges? Similar examples could be multiplied. The general point, however, is fairly simple: introduction of democratic politics and competitive mobilization was slowly chipping away at the corporate cohesiveness of India's traditional social structure. As this happened, the old Congress system of patronage-chains-of-big-men was losing its ability to mobilize an increasingly fragmented political society. The sharp downturn in the Congress’ electoral fortunes in the 1967 national elections must have confirmed this hypothesis for the more astute Indian political leaders, including Indira Gandhi. A new ruling strategy was clearly needed. Many political changes in contemporary India, in turn, are comprehensible if one thinks of them as byproducts of the new ruling strategy, namely, populism aimed at building and sustaining majority conditions in the context of a highly fragmented political society. We know in retrospect that Indira Gandhi, in the early 1970s, adopted a political posture that emphasized the alleviation of poverty as a key theme. This populist strategy paid handsome political dividends, generating large electoral majorities for her. Before investigating the implications of this strategy further, however, we should note that pro-poor populism was by no means an inevitable by-product of a changed political context. It was, rather, a choice from among a handful of other available strategic options. For example, as it became clear during the 1970s that poverty was not going to be readily alleviated, and the empty promises to that effect could not continue to bring electoral rewards, in the 1980s the Congress sought to create winning majorities by flirting with ethnic themes—for instance, Hindus against Indian minorities. This electoral strategy has, of course, been pursued with a vengeance by other Indian political parties in the 1990s. That, however, is another story. One question remains a puzzle. Given a number of available ruling strategies, why didn't Indira Gandhi attempt to systematically rebuild institutions (such as a reformist party) that could enable her to deliver on her reformist promises, and that at the same time could help solidify her electoral base? A definite answer will never be known, but three possible contributing factors can be proposed. First, it would have required a more visionary leader with a greater sense of the public good than Indira Gandhi possessed. Second, building of parties and institutions takes both time and

sustained political attention: Indira Gandhi, instead, devoted most of her energies to blocking real or imagined power threats. Third (and most important), parties cannot be readily decreed from above. More often than not, parties develop as vehicles for capturing power. Those who are already in power, and specially if their power rests on personal popularity, tend to find rules, procedures, and a robust second tier of leaders unnecessarily constraining. They often view institutions more as obstacles and less as facilitators of effective rule. To return to the main theme, growing political fragmentation in the 1960s encouraged the rise of personalistic populism. The forces that have propelled political fragmentation, as well as the consequences of personalistic, populist rule, now need to be discussed, if only briefly. Both socio-economic and political forces have propelled growing mobilization, although, on balance, peculiarities of India's democracy have played a very significant role. Students of development often anticipate growing social mobilization in the context of ‘modernization’. The spread of commerce, new modes of economic activity, literacy and urbanization are generally associated with what Karl Deustch had labelled ‘social mobilization’ (Deutsch 1961). Social mobilization, in turn, is supposed to erode traditional domination, release social actors for new political commitments, and lead to greater levels of political activism, owing either to anomie or to formation of new interest groups. Marxist analysis of the transition from ‘feudalism to capitalism’ is also consistent with this ‘modernization’ analysis; it, too, emphasizes the corroding role of economic change, specially of capitalism, that supposedly renders class inequalities naked, and thus contributes to class conflict and to new levels of activism (Gramsci 1971: 276). There is enough evidence in contemporary India to sustain an analysis that would emphasize socio-economic changes as the basic motor of growing political mobilization. For example, the roots of radical activism of poor peasants in parts of West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, and of the growing political efficacy of the newly wealthy Green Revolution farmers of north-western India are located primarily in socioeconomic changes. What is less well understood in the general literature and to which the Indian experience can contribute, is how peculiarities of democracy in a low-income setting themselves propel higher levels of political mobilization. For example, the state in India seeks to promote development

and is thus highly interventionist. This means that a fair amount of a poor society's free-floating economic resources is accessible primarily through the state, which thus becomes an object of intense political attention. Moreover, since this state is accessible via democratic means, the stakes of winning or losing the electoral game become very high. Rival elite thus use all available means, fair or foul, peaceful or violent, to mobilize support from their respective communities so as to secure access to the society's main milking cow, the state. The diversity of India's plural social structure easily lends itself to competitive mobilization. Because political parties are weak in any case, and also do not organize (and thus systematize) participation, intra-elite political competition is readily transformed into what the Rudolphs have rightly identified as India's growing number of ‘demand groups’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987: Part 4 ). The dynamics underlying this process of over-politicization are both political and economic. Spread of egalitarian values and of competitive politics within the context of India's low-income democracy and an interventionist state have politicized social conflict in a manner that has greatly contributed to fragmentation of India's political society. Some of the evidence for these claims is embedded in the local examples already cited. To recall, the mobilization of Kshatriyas in parts of Gujarat was both political and economic: it was aimed at winning elections and capturing state power; it was led by a partisan political elite; and its main demands were economic rewards from the state (e.g., more ‘reserved’ employment for the ‘backward castes’, or state subsidies). The backwardcaste movements for ‘reservations’ across India have followed a more or less similar pattern. Mobilization of various ethnic groups also has not been all that different. Whether at issue are smaller movements, like those of the Gurkhas in West Bengal, or Marathi-speakers in Belgaum, Karnataka, or movements of much greater significance, like those of the Sikhs of Punjab, or even the Hindu-Muslim conflict in various parts of India, the political dynamics are identifiable: leaders mobilize communities so as to strengthen their own political demands. If demands are met, movements often die down. Just as often, however, demands are not met and movements are intensified, or worse, in spite of concessions—as in the case of the Sikhs— leaders of movements lose control over mobilized followers and fragmented movements develop in volatile and often unpredictable ways.

The most compelling evidence to support the claim that the dynamics of growing political activism are not ‘social mobilization’, á la Deutsch, but are politico-economic, emerges from regional patterns within India. For example, states as diverse as prosperous Gujarat and poor Bihar have experienced considerable political activism over the last decade. If economic development was the primary driving force, how would one explain the very high levels of activism and political violence in an economically stagnant state like Bihar? A better explanation is, rather, this: changing political consciousness and competitive democratic mobilization in a stagnant economy have bequeathed to political demands a zero-sum quality, thus intensifying the sense of threat that political demands pose and periodically lead to political violence. Similarly, the fact that the highly mobilized state of West Bengal has been relatively free of violence and agitations since 1977 must be attributed to rule of a relatively wellorganized reformist party. Political and organizational variables are thus crucial for understanding patterns of political activism in India. To connect the argument back to the main point, introduction of democracy in a highly rigid and inegalitarian social structure has slowly but surely unleashed diverse patterns of mobilization. These activities started intensifying some time in the 1960s and have continued over the last two decades. A major consequence has been the difficulty in forging moderately consensual authority: the more fragmented the political society, the more difficult it has become to form a democratically constituted, coherent centre of power. This political context, in turn, has encouraged personalistic populism. Leaders who promise a little something to everyone, even if vaguely, and those who possess personal appeal—or, as it were, charisma— often emerge powerful in settings of political fragmentation. Personalistic and populist rule, in turn, tends to be inherently centralizing and deinstitutionalizing and does not offer a long-term solution to the problem of building democratic authority. Because power lines link diffuse masses to a single leader, the person at the top is not as constrained by coalitional pressures as are other democratically elected leaders. Of course, such leaders must respect the socially powerful, but they also possess a considerable degree of freedom, not in social restructuring, but in creating a top-down political system. The more the second- and third-tier officials of the polity come to be appointed from above, the less independent power exists within the polity and the more centralized becomes the top of the

political pyramid. Thus emerges the first important paradox of contemporary India: democratization of traditional authority, specially in the rural social structure, has paved the way for centralization of power at the top. The paradox, however, does not stop there. The related and second paradox to which I now turn my attention is, why this centralization and control at the top is difficult to transform into real power to solve problems.

The Recurring Tendency Towards Powerlessness ‘Powerlessness’ refers to the repeated incapacity of rulers to fulfil their stated objectives. Leaders who manage to centralize control over decision making often appear to be very powerful. This, however, can be (and often is) misleading, especially in low-income democracies. Therefore, one needs to make an analytical distinction between centralizing power and developmental power. Centralizing power, as already noted, involves growing control over decision making in the hands of a few leaders, and, by the same token, exclusion of the second and lower levels of the political elite from decision making. Development power, by contrast, refers to a capacity not only to make decisions, but also to carry them through. Developmental power, thus, is the ability of political leaders to alter successfully the behaviour of social actors and groups. Some authoritarian regimes within the Third World are able to transform centralized control into developmental efficacy, mainly by utilizing coercion to alter the behaviour of social groups. But this is rare, even under authoritarian conditions. When the polity is organized as a democracy, coercion definitely cannot be the main currency that leaders utilize to influence socio-economic change. Instead, positive and negative incentives, persuasion, and selective use of laws backed by the threat of coercion— legitimate domination—take on an increased significance. Within a democracy, therefore, the capacity to initiate major developmental changes from above comes to rest on a prior capacity of leaders to institutionalize ‘blocs of consensus’, or to build majority coalitions to support a specific path of change. For majority coalitions not only to elect specific leaders, but also to provide sustained support for the implementation of leaders’ programmes, in turn, requires that the link between rulers and supporters, or between the political centre and social periphery, be durable. This durability is likely to exist if the relationship of leaders and supporters is

institutionalized through such mechanisms as political parties. Democratic leaders, whose power rests on well-organized parties, are thus in a better position to implement developmental programmes than are leaders with a diffuse and populist support base. These generalizations can be supported with some empirical materials from India. However, one general caveat needs to be made. Leaders in democracies often need the support of multiple constituencies and thus often pursue multiple goals. This simple observation has two important implications for the discussion that follows. First, under the best of circumstances, democratic governments seldom act decisively, but, rather, tend to muddle through. This should raise one's tolerance for what is a ‘normal’ level of developmental performance in a democracy; the ‘decisive and flexible’ South Korean state under Park Chung Hee, for example, and the ‘flabby and muddling through’ Indian state reflect, in part, the differences in regime type. Weakness of parties and other institutions that could systematically link the state and society in India is an additional variable that further contributes to the powerlessness of that country's centralizing and personalistic leaders. Second, the capacity to fulfil goals often varies from goal to goal. Whether parties are weak or strong, varying with the nature of the coalitional support, some goals are easier to pursue than others, and the pursuit of some goals makes it difficult to achieve other goals. Given these caveats, a few examples from contemporary India can now be provided to explain how and why growing centralization did not lead to increased power to achieve developmental goals. Two different types of examples are discussed: the incapacity of Indira Gandhi to follow through on her major commitment to alleviate poverty, and the political difficulties that Rajiv Gandhi ran into when he attempted to redirect India's importsubstitution development model in a more ‘liberal’ direction.

Indira Gandhi and Poverty Alleviation ‘Garibi Hatao’ or ‘Alleviate Poverty’ was Indira Gandhi's main political slogan throughout the 1970s. Yet we know in retrospect that Indira Gandhi did not have much success in alleviating India's rural poverty, certainly not through the mechanism of redistributive state intervention. Because such gaps between rhetoric and outcome are fairly common in the Third World, the gap itself is not very surprising. Why it nevertheless poses an interesting

analytical puzzle is because of the following: Indira Gandhi won sizeable electoral majorities on the basis of her populist slogan; she came to have tremendous personal control over India's crucial political decisions; and for a short while (1975-77), she even possessed near-authoritarian powers. Why did it prove so difficult to transform these power resources into a capacity to implement some redistributive programmes, such as land reforms? The reason, is, in part, that it is very difficult for any state to reach out into the nooks and crannies of a society and hope to restructure social relations in a manner that would benefit the weak at the expense of the socially powerful. Next to making war, redistributive reforms are probably the most difficult task a state can undertake. If leaders use standard operating procedures, such as passing laws, and hope the bureaucracy implements them, land reforms do not get implemented. Given that those who own land are often powerful, the lower reaches of the state's bureaucratic arm are seldom efficacious enough to fight the powerful on the behalf of the weak, specially on a society's periphery, where bureaucratic supervision tends to be slack. What is more likely is that lower-level state officials and the socially powerful rural elite establish cosy working relationships, and redistributive laws are not implemented. If such reforms are to be implemented, what is needed instead is much more political intervention— one that can simultaneously strengthen the weak by organizing them, and utilize politicized implementing agents, usually party cadres, that more readily respond to the decisions of rulers than bureaucrats. I have argued elsewhere in a book-length study that redistributive intervention in India's low-income democracy has been best facilitated by well-organized, left-of-centre ruling parties (Kohli 1987). The absence of such an instrument made it almost impossible for Indira Gandhi to follow through on her political platform of Garibi Hatao. The argument in this other study was developed by a comparative analysis of regional Indian materials. It was documented that redistributive reforms were much more successfully implemented in a state like West Bengal than in several other Indian states, including those run by Indira Gandhi's party. I traced this success to the role of the ruling party in West Bengal, a party that calls itself Communist—the Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM)—but is essentially social democratic in ideology, though sharing a tight organization with other Leninist parties. The party rests its power on a

coalition of middle and lower rural classes. This social base, combined with a good party organization, enabled the CPM to successfully implement mildly redistributive tenancy reforms in one part of India. More recent regional evidence from India further supports the significance of well-organized parties as agents of redistribution, although it is also important to reaffirm the issue of the regime's social base. West Bengal continues to be one of the few states in which tenancy reforms have been successfully implemented over the last ten to fifteen years. Nevertheless, having implemented these reforms, the CPM regime has stopped short of implementing any further land redistribution that could benefit the really poor, the landless agriculture labourers. The CPM also has not made any real effort to organize these labourers, so as to improve their wages. The main reason for this is the difficulty the CPM faces in holding together a coalition of middle peasants and landless labourers. Because the middle peasants often employ these landless labourers and some of their lands may be affected by radical land reform, the CPM had decided to go slow. The analytical point is clear: party organization is only one significant variable in successful redistribution. The social base of the ruling party is another important factor that conditions a regime's policy proclivities. Lest the correspondence between the social base of power and a state's policy behaviour be overdrawn, the case of Gujarat in the 1980s provides a ready check. The winning coalition that the Congress party under Madhav Singh Solanki put together in Gujarat was nearly identical to the CPM's power base in West Bengal. As in Bengal, Solanki succeeded in excluding the elite landholding groups—the Patidars—and rested his power instead on Kshatriyas and Adivasis, the middle and the lower strata. Once in power, however, in contrast to West Bengal, Solanki did not even attempt land reforms. When he tried to implement something as mild as the ‘reservation’ policy—a policy that would have done little more than ensure a few thousand future jobs in the public sector to the middle and lower strata— Gujarat became embroiled in major riots. These riots were initiated by the Patidars and they severely checked Solanki's power to attempt even token redistribution. Solanki, in turn, could neither hold together the coalition of his own supporters, nor fight the opposition with any success. The root of this weakness was the absence of a well-organized party. Without a party, the government's supporters were not deeply attached to a programme, the ruling elite remained factionalized, and a coherent force could not be

generated to confront the socially powerful. Clearly, identical social coalitions do not provide a ready explanation of a regime's redistributive performance. The ideology and the organization of the ruling party remain crucial variables for understanding success or failure at redistribution in contemporary India. The absence of a well-organized, left-of-centre party was what made it difficult for Indira Gandhi to translate her left-of-centre political goals into reformist outcomes. In other words, without an instrument to systematically link the state and society, personalistic power enabled centralization, but did not generate power to achieve goals. It is important only to add—although the point is relatively obvious—that the presence of a specific type of instrument does not mean that the capacity of leaders to accomplish all types of goals will be enhanced. A well-organized left-of-centre party, for example, may enhance the leadership's redistributive capacity but may have no bearing on the capacity to deal with ethnic conflicts, or may well have negative impact on economic growth. The issue of when states have capacities to achieve their goals thus remains a highly complex one, varying not only across countries, but also across issues within a country.

Rajiv Gandhi and Economic Liberalization Having recognized that India's industrial growth was relatively sluggish, specially in comparison with such other developing countries as South Korea, Rajiv Gandhi attempted to alter India's development strategy. This was in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination, and after Rajiv Gandhi had ridden a ‘sympathy wave’ to power with a massive electoral majority in early 1985. We know in retrospect that Rajiv had some success in implementing ‘liberalization’, but also that he faced numerous obstacles. Eventually, he had to backtrack in a more populist direction. Moreover, whatever success he may have had probably cost him electoral support in the 1989 elections. 2 A brief discussion of this example, therefore, highlights a somewhat different analytical point than the one already discussed with reference to the issue of redistribution. The general point continues to be the same, namely, the inability to translate personalistic power into developmental results; the more specific point here is that the attempt to translate non-specific electoral mandates into specific policy goals quickly runs into obstacles.

The first issue that needs to be understood is why recent elections in India have all been won on fairly non-specific mandates. For those who do not follow Indian politics, it is important to know that ever since 1967, most national elections in India have been conducted in the shadow of some extraordinary event. The 1971 election, for example, took place when the nationalist euphoria over the dismemberment of Pakistan (and the birth of Bangladesh) was high, and when Indira Gandhi's sharp shift towards populism had also raised the hopes of many. National emergency was imposed in 1975 as a result of growing and violent political opposition. Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 elections, mainly owing to the Emergency, but the dramatic failure of the opposition to hold the coalition together catapulted her back to power in 1980. There was a widespread feeling in India in the early 1980s that, had Indira Gandhi not been assassinated in 1984, she would have done poorly in the national elections of 1985. Her assassination, which created a widespread fear of impending turmoil, as well as sympathy for her son, brought Rajiv to power with a large electoral majority in early 1985. The 1989 elections were one of the few ‘normal’ elections in India since 1967, and it is not surprising that, as in 1967, the Congress party again lost its dominant position. The elections in 1991 that brought the Congress back to power again reflected the inability of the Congress’ opposition to work together, as well as the dramatic assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. The general point is that the Congress party lost its nationalist hegemony over India some time in the 1960s, and ever since then it has been difficult for Congress leaders to put together a winning coalition. This task has become specially difficult because the memory of unfulfilled populist promises is fresh, and populism has probably lost its electoral efficacy. Without parties, programmes and stable coalitions, therefore, electoral victories have had to be ‘manufactured’ by creating, or taking advantage of, extraordinary events that generate electorally consequential national moods like euphoria or crises. Electoral majorities based on non-specific and nearly sensational mandates are thus not only fortuitous, they have become an integral part of how to create a coherent centre of power in contemporary India. The analytical issue for us now is, how leaders who win power through such means fare while in power. Rajiv Gandhi was elected on a very general, non-specific mandate and did rather poorly while in power. His attempts to ‘liberalize’ India's economy

afford important glimpses into the underlying dynamics. Liberalization in India mainly has meant providing incentives—or at least removing disincentives—for the profitability of private production, with the hope that this would improve both the levels and the quality of investment, and lead to high levels of economic growth. Although eminently ‘rational’ from the standpoint of improving production output from private sources, attempts to implement such policy measures created major political problems for Rajiv Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi did not win by putting together a pro-growth coalition that sought to liberalize India's economy. As a matter of fact, his electoral victory had no or little economic component. As soon as he attempted to translate his broad mandate into a specific economic direction, the first major source of resistance was his own party. Even though the Congress is not much of a party any more, many of those who had been in appointed positions from the time of Indira Gandhi baulked at Rajiv's attempted redirection. The motives behind this resistance were mixed: some feared that the abandonment of ‘socialist’ economic policies in favour of a more ‘liberal’ approach would cost the party electoral support among India's majority, the rural poor; others worried that ‘liberalization’ would eventually lead to the opening of the economy to external economic influences, thus threatening sovereignty; yet others saw the new policy regime as signalling that new officials would come to run the party and thus sought to block any major change as a way of preserving personal power. Whatever the motives (and they were mixed), the general point is this: because a major policy initiative was not part of the party platform that had facilitated electoral victory, there was no cohesive support for the initiative, even within the ruling party. Because Rajiv Gandhi stood at the apex of what was by now a top-down political system, the resistance of the party may have slowed his initiatives, but was by no means decisive. Rajiv replaced those who really resisted with those who were more loyal, and, at least during 1985 and 1986, continued with his liberalization measures. Very soon, however, opposition to his new policies grew. For example, Rajiv's attempts to reduce India's public expenditure on poverty programmes evoked considerable opposition, including, once again, that from the Congress’ own senior political officials. Rajiv backtracked. When plans to remove subsidies on prices of essential goods, like kerosene, were

announced, numerous opposition parties threatened a general strike across urban India. Once again, Rajiv Gandhi backtracked. And when plans to invite Japanese auto manufacturers to produce automobiles in India were leaked, India's import-substitution-coddled businesspeople brought pressure on the government, and attempts to alter India's foreign investment policies were put aside. Clearly, different components of the ‘liberalization’ package evoked opposition from all social groups likely to be affected. Finally, the opposition that really hurt Rajiv Gandhi was that of rural groups, which started viewing the new policy measures as pro-city and prorich. While such an interpretation was not necessary, specially because measures like devaluation can shift the terms of trade in favour of the peasantry, the problem was one of political management. Without a party, Rajiv Gandhi simply did not have the political resources needed to persuade and incorporate sections of the rural population behind his programme. What happened instead was that other political actors, at lower levels of the polity, succeeded in counter-mobilizing. Rajiv's new economic policies had led to an increase in industrial production, specially in durable consumer goods. Worried that these might not clear the market, the government had also provided numerous incentives for urban consumers to consume more. The resulting development strategy was, and could thus be easily characterized as, benefiting the urban rich. Peasant leaders took advantage of the new opportunity and successfully mobilized rural groups against the Congress party. When the Congress lost the elections in 1987 in the crucial, Hindi-heartland state of Haryana, only then did Rajiv Gandhi realize how politically expensive the new economic rationality had become. After 1987, one heard less and less about economic liberalization in India, at least until 1991, when another new government started pushing this agenda. That again, however, is a different story. There was no major policy reversal during 1987 and 1991, but there was also no major policy movement. Instead, Rajiv Gandhi readopted some of the more populist economic programmes. It should be noted in passing that the more torn he became by the conflicting pulls of economic and political rationality, the less he used economic policies as tools of electoral mobilization. It can be argued that the Congress’ renewed interest in mobilization around religious sentiments was rooted in this contradiction. Indira Gandhi's populism had won majorities, but poverty alleviation policies were never implemented. As Rajiv Gandhi attempted to reorder economic policies in a pro-growth

direction—which might eventually benefit India's poor—the short-term problem became one of securing electoral majorities. If the majorityminority pie is not to be cut along the poor-rich angle, the other obvious angle in India is Hindus versus minorities, especially Muslims. The Congress’ growing flirtation with a pro-Hindu orientation, and the electoral success of other political parties with similar commitments, is thus partly rooted in these contemporary political tensions. Rajiv Gandhi did implement some liberalization measures, but was also forced to curtail many of his other planned actions. Where he did succeed in implementation, the moves may have cost him important political support. It thus becomes clear that in spite of a massive electoral majority, Rajiv Gandhi could not translate this general support into a force to help him pursue his own policy priorities, mainly because the support he had enjoyed in early 1985 was very diffuse and without a strong mandate to do anything specific. If economic liberalization is what Rajiv Gandhi stood for, it should have been tested in the market place of electoral politics. If he could have thus put together a pro-liberalization, pro-growth majority coalition, and given this coalition some durability by incorporating its representatives into a party organization, the problem of implementation would have been qualitatively different. As already argued, however, without parties, programmes, and stable coalitions, non-specific electoral mandates have become a near necessity in contemporary India. Attempts to translate these victories into specific new policies have, in turn, become very difficult. The greater the gap, therefore, between how power is won and how power is used , the more India's political system continues to muddle through at a relatively low level of efficacy.

Conclusion This paper has sought to identify and explain a recurring tendency in Indian politics towards centralization and powerlessness. Its purpose has been both to analyse an important political problem and to demonstrate the utility of the state-society approach. It is now important to conclude by drawing together some arguments concerning the substantial analytical puzzle and the approach embedded in the analysis. The puzzle I have sought to analyse here plagues many developing countries: control over national decisions comes to centralize in the person

of a single leader or a few leaders, but the leadership finds it difficult to transform this control into developmental efficacy. The argument I have developed regarding India may or may not apply to other developing countries. My hunch is that it is likely to have some relevance to other lowincome democracies, but that the dynamics within authoritarian systems are different. The main condition that helps explain the tendency towards centralization and powerlessness in India is the weakness of systematic authority links between the political centre and the social periphery. The spread of democracy has eroded patterns of traditional domination in the social structure. Numerous groups have thus been mobilized into the political arena, but such mobilization has not been accompanied by a systematic reorganization of the newly mobilized forces. Political parties could have been major institutional means of such reincorporation. Parties, however, take time to emerge. In India, moreover, power-hungry leaders contributed to the destruction of old, established parties. Weakness of parties and fragmentation of power in the social structure have made the task of forging effective government—a government able to resolve conflicts without violence and follow through on its policy promises—very difficult. One of the few alternatives for creating a coherent political centre in a fragmented polity is leaders with personal appeal. Following the logic that leaders like power, such leaders characteristically create top-down political systems of loyal minions. Since rules and procedures constrain personal discretion, personalistic leaders also do not always view—specially if they are short-sighted—the need to create institutions as desirable. Fragmentation of power in India has thus provided the context that encourages personalistic and centralizing leaders to emerge. We have also noted that personalistic control in India has proven hard to translate into power to achieve policy goals. This was true of both redistributive and growth goals. In both cases, our analysis has suggested, leaders needed a political instrument to translate their goals into outcomes, but such an instrument was missing. Instruments such as parties could have helped bring together leaders and supporters into a durable ‘power bloc’. This institutionalized power, in turn, could have been used to pursue specific goals. The question that remains is this: Supposing Rajiv Gandhi's power had rested on a well-organized growth coalition, what would have been the

implication of such a power configuration for redistributive goals? The answer in the abstract is that the implication may well have been negative. The reverse is probably also true. A well-organized redistributive coalition in power can hurt economic growth. How, then, can states simultaneously pursue goals that may be in tension? There is no easy answer. One possible way of thinking about the problem, however, is as follows. Because interests of social factors vary, one needs parties in societies that emphasize alternative goals. It is no accident that many well-established democracies are served well by alternating rule between growth and redistributive coalitions. Within developing-country democracies, where political communities are not well-established, and where the state must perform important economic functions, the need for well-organized parties of competing orientations becomes that much greater. Well-organized parties are some of the few available political instruments that can both represent interests and concentrate them at the top, enabling party leaders, if they win majority support, to pursue development democratically. Crafting well-organized parties, thus, remains an important long-term goal of political engineering in the Third World. A last set of concluding comments concerns the state-society approach embedded in the analysis here. First, if the argument developed in this paper is persuasive, it should strengthen the general claim, namely, that state and society condition each other continuously, and that patterns of political change must be analysed by focusing on state-society interaction. Second, this paper's analysis suggests that what the national leaders do, or do not do, cannot be discovered without travelling down the political and social hierarchies, where at the ‘periphery’ the social and political forces provide the context that condition the nature of central rule. And last, this analysis also leads to the argument that our understanding of state and society ought to be deeply political. Instead of a bureaucratic vision of the state, and a tendency to view social structures as given, it is important to recognize that both political and social actors wish to shape the use of authority in social change, and in the process, both the state and society are formed and reformed. The struggles for domination and opposition are struggles over life chances and thus tend to generate political struggles. How the resulting political struggles are co-opted, repressed, or utilized, is essential to an understanding of how political change in developing countries proceeds.

Notes 1 . This idea has a long intellectual lineage, from Tocqueville, through T.H. Marshall, to Reinhard Bendix and Charles Tilly. See, for example, Bendix (1977: 62–65, 419–34). 2 . The liberalization attempts begun in mid-1991 have been somewhat more successful. The analytical lessons of that experiment, however, will be materials for another essay.

References Bendix, Reinhard . 1977. Nation Building and Citizenship. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brass, Paul R. 1990. The Politics of India Since Independence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Deutsch, Karl. 1961. ‘Social Mobilization and Political Development’, American Political Science Review , 55, September. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Huntington, Samuel. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kohli, Atul. 1987. The State and Poverty in India: Politics of Reform. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1990a. Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. (ed.). 1990b. India's Democracy: An Analysis of Changing State-Society Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press (rev. paperback edn.). Migdal, Joel. 1994. ‘The State in Society: An Approach to Struggles for Domination’, in Joel Migdal, Atul Kohli and Vivien Shue (eds), State, Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World , pp. 7-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Mumbai: Orient Longman.

PART IV

10 Decline of a Social Order FRANCINE R. FRANKEL Analysing Dominance and State Power in Independent India ‘Transfer of Power’ by the British Raj to the Government of India is a phrase which implies considerable continuity with the past. Yet, the governmental structures which were established after British rule introduced a complexity into relations within the state, and of the state with society, that marked an important break with the colonial period. The standard definitions of the state, derived mainly from continental European experience, would have served adequately to describe the British Raj. Despite the series of constitutional reforms between 1909 and 1935 that provided for increasing Indian representation in the central legislature and provincial assemblies, the nature of the state was best captured by the classic concepts of sovereignty over a recognized territory, centralized public institutions, and a monopoly over the legitimate use of force. The officials who served in the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the Indian Police Service (IPS) and the Indian Army, in addition, were, inculcated with a sense of the public domain that transcended particular social groups. In an ironical transposition of the sacred and secular bases of power noted earlier, the Indian bureaucrats who filled key positions in the state were drawn from predominately Brahmin and other small literati elite recruited across regions. After the departure of the British, they became, in a further irony, viewed from the perspective of Gandhi's vision, the backbone of the national class committed to modernizing India as an industrial nation.

The all-India services of the Indian state were the major institutional legacy of the British Raj. These public institutions laid the foundations for the successor bureaucratic and managerial state, whose functions, powers and personnel grew exponentially once India embarked upon its strategy of planned economic development. By the 1980s, the bureaucrats manning the public sector were far more powerful than their counterparts in the large private business houses. They presided over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy in the organized industrial sector, and administered a formidable regulatory apparatus for the licensing and expansion of private enterprises, import and export of capital goods, allocation of foreign exchange, and clearances to raise capital from the public. Between 1969 and 1973 alone, their powers were expanded by nationalization of banks, general insurance, and the coal mining industry, the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act (MRTP) devised to limit investment by the larger industrial houses to the heavy investment core sector, and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), restricting the role of foreign capital in Indian industry. The bureaucracy's commanding presence was not confined to the organized industrial sector. The Planning Commission, established as an expert advisory body in 1950, enlarged its control over planning in the states through authoritative recommendations for ‘discretionary’ transfer of funds by the centre for plan grants. By the 1970s, the power to legislate on economic and social planning, shared by the centre and the states, was used by the centre to introduce a plethora of centrally-sponsored schemes in the rural areas across regions. These were administered at the district level by the collector or deputy development commissioner of the IAS (Indian Administrative Service). Education was also added to the powers on the union list. The bureaucracy's power grew in government affairs from the mid-1960s, reaching its apogee during the 1975-77 period of national Emergency. Even in normal times, the establishment of the prime minister's secretariat and its steady growth over successive decades into a set of offices parallel to those of the key ministers, staffed by expert advisers and senior civil servants, extended bureaucratic reach into the policy-making process through direct access to the prime minister, which bypassed the cabinet on major questions of economic measures and foreign affairs.

The full panoply of the Indian state's power appears even more formidable once the steady expansion in its coercive institutions from the mid-1960s is taken into account. By the 1980s, the civil police forces officered by the elite central cadre of the IPS numbered about 750,000, the provincial (state) armed constabularies accounted for about 400,000, the proliferating paramilitary units under the control of central government ministries made up another 350,000-600,000, and the standing army reached one million. Nevertheless, for analytical purposes, it is important to preserve a distinction between the public institutions of the Indian state, which represent a major continuity with British rule, and the political institutions of parliamentary democracy and division of powers that were fully elaborated only after Independence in the 1950 Constitution. The analytical advantages of maintaining this distinction become clear once questions are raised about the basis of political legitimacy, the dual foci of sovereignty involved in the separation of powers between the union (centre) and the states, and the autonomy of the Indian state from important social groups contending for control over the decision-making process. First, it is quite apparent that the political legitimacy of the Indian state did not flow from those powerful public institutions which had their origins as instruments of colonial rule. Rather, it derived from the principle of popular sovereignty upon which the 1950 Constitution established the political institutions of parliamentary government. The Constitution was said to be given by the people to themselves, and despite assaults mounted on it in the interim, the position remained that the basic structure could not be changed except by another Constituent Assembly.

The Political Institutions of the Indian State The political institutions of the Indian state were initially a gift to the masses by an elite political class of predominately Hindu men of the twiceborn varnas , heavily weighted towards urban, English-educated Brahmins who shared a secular outlook. This gift from above represented in significant degree the political values of intellectuals who perceived the parliamentary system as the most highly developed form of modern politics. It provided to the weaker sections of the population in the principle of one person, one vote, their single greatest gain from Independence.

The consensus hammered out in the Constituent Assembly reflected other calculations of political realism. The very fact that after Independence India continued to be a patchwork of diverse regional, religious, caste and tribal groups argued for an accommodative approach to building coalitions capable of ensuring national integration. At the same time, the new political institutions, to be acceptable to entrenched elite across diverse regions, had to be constituted in a form that presented little immediate danger to the sociocultural foundations of dominance. This was accomplished in two main ways. First, legislative institutions were embedded within a division of union and state subjects that reserved powers for the states on most matters affecting the governance of the vast rural population, including agriculture, land tenures, and local government. Second, parliamentary government was conjoined to guaranteed Fundamental Rights, originally including property. Except under extraordinary conditions of a breakdown in the constitutional machinery of a particular state and a proclamation of emergency permitting President's Rule through the state governors, the writ of the IAS did not run beyond the subjects in the union or the concurrent lists. Under all circumstances, officers of the national administrative and police services did not occupy any position below the level of district administration. The ruling Congress party, moreover, adopted a conciliatory approach to the privileged communities and classes that virtually ruled out any direct attempt to organize the lower castes and poorer classes for political action. As the movement credited with winning independence for India, the Congress continued to portray itself as the only secular party with a national constituency representing the interests of all social groups, including the poor and the minorities. The party thereby retained its identity with Gandhi, and through him with ‘Indian culture’, subsequently transmuted into the accommodative politics of the ‘Congress culture’. The poor were encouraged to look less to an individual, and more to the state for improvement in their condition. The Constitution, Parliament and the Congress party all made symbolic commitments to provide for the educational, social and economic advance of the poorest sections under the socialistic pattern of society. During the Nehru years—the period in which the foundations of India's modern industrial economy were built—the centre was greatly limited in what it could accomplish by way of institutional changes to help the poor in

the vast rural sector. The prime minister and the score or so of committed officials appointed by him to the advisory Planning Commission enjoyed mainly the authority to set down general principles of policy. Powers of implementation rested with the state legislatures. The leaders of these state governments, although virtually all Congressmen until 1967, either belonged to or depended upon locally dominant landholding castes to mobilize the rural vote and win state and national elections. The names of these castes and even their ritual status (whether twice-born or sat -Shudra) varied from region to region, as did the configuration of the coalitions they put together, but the pattern was similar enough to make it recognizable as the one-party-dominant ‘Congress system’. Within this system, the range of social groups represented in the ruling party was considered its most positive feature, making it possible for opposition parties to influence government policies by forging links with like-minded Congress factions. This whole process was represented as an example of restraint by the ruling party (which took the opposition seriously), and of the responsibility of the opposition parties (which functioned according to the norms of a loyal opposition). Along with these norms were associated practices of intraparty democracy, socially rooted party and political leaders at the state and district levels, and honest and efficient administration. Like all ideal types, this schematic picture of consensual politics under the one-party-dominant system abstracts from a much more complex reality, one which included very low levels of political awareness among the lower castes and poorer classes. It is, in fact, arguable that politics in the Nehru period as a whole is best understood as a continuum of the Raj. Whatever social configurations the Congress party confronted in the various states, its leaders, like the British before them, did not attempt to change the social order but to adapt to it.

The Struggle for Political and State Power: Rise of the Backward Classes The politics of elite accommodation identified with the ‘Congress culture’ did not disappear all at once. In the states, where the level of political awareness remained relatively low, particularly in the former princely states like Rajasthan, or in backward areas like Orissa, or in Maharashtra with its unique pattern of social incorporation by the Marathas of the Kunbi

peasantry, the model of elite pluralism prevailed into the 1980s. In a large number of states, where politicization of the disadvantaged lower castes and poorer classes was further advanced, the competition for political and state power was carried out by social groups banded together into Backward Classes and Forward Castes in contours first shaped under the British Raj. The political mobilization of the Backward Classes, whether pursued by regional or national political parties, rested on appeals to caste sentiments among cognate groups that cut across class differences to maintain the segmentation of the poor around distinctive social, ethnic and religious categories. The political divisiveness of this approach was least serious in the states of South India where the Forward Castes had themselves emerged from the landowning Shudra peasantry, and where backward Hindus demanded a share in the privileges of dominant groups without seeking to displace them. In Tamil Nadu, the subnational Tamil cultural identity was associated with a community ideology that measured caste-Hindu privileges mainly against the ‘unprivilege’ of Scheduled Castes. Rising levels of reservations to 68 per cent at places (including 15 per cent for Scheduled Castes), and introduction of an additional category of ‘most backward’ by the late 1980s did little to disrupt the politics of accommodation. On one hand, the DMKs (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagams) provided significant new opportunities of social mobility for individuals from the lower castes, particularly in urban areas, who found employment in white-collar jobs. On the other, the ruling parties quietly made more places for Brahmins and other upper castes excluded in the highly competitive ‘merit’ recruitment to government educational institutions, through the device of permitting privately founded engineering and medical colleges (sustained by high capitation fees) to affiliate with the degree-granting state universities. These policies, in combination with the munificent social welfare programmes adopted by the state government stabilized popular support, without threatening the economic interests of the landed upper castes or business classes, which supported the DMKs while remaining outside formal political office. On the whole, in South India, reservations for Backward Classes combined with high expenditure on social welfare programmes sustained the politics of accommodation by enabling some small proportion of the disadvantaged castes to join the urban middle classes and find places in the political and public institutions of the state. By contrast, such policies in

other regions, more rigidly structured around varna divisions, produced violent confrontations between Backward Classes and Forward Castes that made the institutions of the state arenas of conflict and rendered them ineffective in defusing caste and class confrontation. A complex example was provided by Gujarat, where the Patidars made an independent bid for political power by deserting the Congress in the 1975 election for the United Front (a forerunner of the Janata). The Congress strategy of constructing the KHAM (Koli-Kshatriya, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims) alliance of disadvantaged social groups, returned it to power in 1980. Yet, the attempt to shift the social base of political power from the Vanias, Brahmins and Patidars to the Kolis was resisted by the upper castes, which felt superior in varna terms to these groups and also controlled much greater resources. By the early 1980s, the Vanias and Brahmins, worried about increasing levels of educated unemployment, already blamed their difficulties on implementation of 21 per cent reservation for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The Patidars, moreover, who claimed Kshatriya rank, were only roughly at par with the Scheduled Castes and artisan castes in college education. They did not benefit from the Janata state government's policy, in 1978, of providing 10 per cent reservations for the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC). Resentment of the upper castes against all reservations had spilled over into violence against the Scheduled Castes during three months of sporadic rioting in 1981. Against this background, the decision of the state government, in 1985, to raise the quota for the SEBC to 28 per cent resulted in uncontrollable agitations, strikes and violence by high- and middle-caste students, government employees, doctors and the police, leaving only the Indian Army to restore order, and that after the higher quota was withdrawn. These events not only polarized Gujarat's society between the upper and lower castes, but perhaps more dangerous for social cohesion in large areas of the country, led to communal riots between Hindus and Muslims. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Backward Classes emerged as important political forces from the 1960s in opposition to the Congress party, initially identifying with the socialists, and then with Charan Singh's various coalition parties. In these states, the struggle was waged between more evenly balanced numbers, across varna lines of Shudra and twice-born, for the purpose of replacing the upper castes as political leaders in the state

legislatures, and, through reservations, diluting their virtual monopoly over senior posts in the state services. The confrontation also included a class dimension. Leaders of the Backward Classes attempted to expand their social bases among the prosperous rich and middle peasantry by appealing to the poor peasantry's common resentment against the upper castes, which did not soil their hands with the menial tasks of cultivation historically assigned to the lower orders. An aggravating factor in both industrially backward states was that the towns offered few economic opportunities for the educated sections of the upper castes, except those in the enlarged civil services. Similarly, entry into these positions was perceived by the Backward Classes as the only avenue for overcoming the caste disabilities that prevented them from achieving equal dignity and power in society. The multiple strands of this conflict, which involved issues of ideology, status, class and power all at once, pulled against the whole fabric of the social order. The first attempt by the short-lived Janata government in 1978 to enforce a reservations policy in Bihar of 25 per cent for the Other Backward Classes triggered large-scale street fighting and polarized Backwards and Forwards in towns and villages throughout the state. The Forwards regained the upper hand after the Janata split into the Lok Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), facilitating the Congress (I)'s return to national and state power in 1980. Nevertheless, the struggle continued unabated. The law-and-order machinery of the state appeared paralyzed as political workers on both sides acquired weapons and sought the help of criminals in booth-capturing at election time. Although caste and community remained the primary identities for all groups, the Backwards began to forge alliances with poor peasants among the Rajputs, Scheduled Castes and Muslims. This coalition threw its support behind the Janata Dal (a combine of disillusioned exCongressmen, socialists and the Lok Dal who had earlier supported the Janata), which ousted the Congress (I) at the national level in 1989, and displaced it as the single largest party in Bihar in 1990. Political developments in Uttar Pradesh during the same period (between 1977 and 1989) revealed some similar features. The Janata government's more modest reservation policy of 15 per cent for the Other Backward Classes had met with riots in the eastern districts. Subsequently, during the long interregnum of Congress (I) rule, the Backward Classes were outflanked by a Brahmin and Thakur alignment with the Scheduled Castes.

Nevertheless, the MAJGAR (Muslims, Ahirs, Jats, Gujjars, Rajputs and other backward castes) alliance pieced together by the Janata Dal in 1989 held together well enough to break up the traditional Congress vote bank, and to cost it control over both the central and the state governments. Equally striking, the Janata Dal's victory was achieved with the electoral cooperation of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the first party led by a member of the Scheduled Castes to mobilize large numbers of these communities and the most backward castes on an anti-Brahmin and anticaste platform in the Aryan heartland.

Towards Restructuring of Dominance and State Power Relations The victory of the Janata Dal under V.P. Singh at the centre in 1989 and in several states in 1989 and 1990, indicated further the disintegration in North India of long-established patterns of vertical mobilization, and placed in relief the outline for a new basis of horizontal cooperation of the disadvantaged social groups. Nevertheless, the coalition which defeated the Congress (I) had a contingent configuration formed out of shared ambitions and special antipathies. The core of its support in North India came from an alignment between Rajputs (Thakurs) and the more prosperous sections of the Backward Classes, specially Yadavs, Jats, Kurmis and other middle castes. The cooperation between Thakurs and the Backward Classes was itself a new social phenomenon in an area where memories were fresh of oppression by Thakur zamindars and jagirdars of Yadavs, Jats and other cultivating castes. Beyond this, the support of Muslims, which was crucial to the Janata Dal victory, had represented an emotional repudiation of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of the Congress (I). His transparent attempt to manipulate the religious sentiments of both Hindus and Muslims by an ill-conceived election strategy for placating both sides in the long-standing dispute for control of the site in Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh) of the Babri mosque, believed by orthodox Hindus to be the birthplace of the god Ram (Ramjanmabhoomi) alienated Muslims, and many Hindus alike, from the Congress (I). Beyond this, the largest section of the Scheduled Castes and the smaller backward castes supporting the BSP also turned away from the

Congress (I) to assert their antipathy to upper-caste control, whether of the secular leadership of the Congress (I) or the Hindu nationalist BJP. The future of this alignment in 1990 was uncertain. The Backward Classes and kisans (farmers) had supported the Janata Dal, as they had the Janata and the Lok Dals in earlier elections, perceiving it to be their own political vehicle for rising to power not only in the states but at the centre too. They placed the highest importance on promises of the party leadership to meet their social as well as economic demands as a new agrarian middle class, which had a dual origin in the low castes and cultivating peasantry. Among these promises were commitments by the national leadership to implement the recommendation of the (B.P. Mandal) Backward Classes Commission, first made in 1980, to provide 27 per cent reservations for the Backward Classes in the all-India services of the IAS and IPS. Above and beyond this, the Janata Dal promised to redirect plan priorities from the industrial to the rural sector, allocating more than 50 per cent of expenditure to agriculture, and waiving repayment of bank loans to agriculturists. The outlook was also clouded by the minority position of the Janata Dal government, which was dependent on support in the Lok Sabha (House of the People) of ideologically opposed parties, the CPI (M) and the CPI on one side, and the BJP on the other. Even as the Backward Classes savoured their first taste of political power at the centre, their ability to establish an enduring social combination to displace the upper castes remained in question. Day-to-day conflicts between the more affluent cultivating peasantry and landless labourers over both caste discrimination and economic rights, reflecting persistent caste and class divisions between Backward Classes and the Scheduled Castes, left the continuing support of the BSP for the Janata Dal uncertain. At the same time, the BJP's appeal to the ‘Hindu identity’ as an overarching basis of mobilization met with unexpected response in the states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The renewed salience of religion in politics in 1989 and 1990 brought the BJP to power in Madhya Pradesh and Himachal, and expanded its role in Rajasthan and Gujarat as a partner of the Janata Dal. It revealed yet again the almost inexhaustible possibilities in the Indian context for exploiting social and religious identities to divide and split the poor. This resurgence of religious sentiment first came into sharp focus in Punjab, as the Congress (I) secretly manipulated divisions between moderate and fundamentalist

Sikhs as a means of defeating the Akali Dal. The same tactic was subtly employed by the Congress (I) in the 1984 national elections which appealed to anti-Sikh sentiments to buttress support from Hindu voters in northern and central India. Such subliminal religious appeals by the Congress (I) created a favourable climate for the better-organized BJP in an electoral alliance with the Janata Dal to displace the Congress (I) in several areas. This new climate was further charged by the rise of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front which mounted a secessionist movement on the heels of the terrorist movement in Punjab, arousing renewed debate about the meaning of secularism in Indian conditions. Although India's major political parties contrived to mobilize the poor on the basis of community rather than class , this did not mean that economic differentiation was unimportant in understanding the relationship between dominance and state power in the late 1980s. Except in West Bengal and Kerala, the unorganized majority of the poor peasantry, agricultural labourers, artisan classes and workers in the informal sector (including the 40 per cent or so officially estimated to be living below the poverty line) were placed in the position of dependants relative to the managerial state. Over the last twenty years, their situation has been ameliorated by financial resources provided through the central government to the districts for social welfare schemes administered by the bureaucracy, and by growing amounts of carefully monitored funds made available by foreign agencies to support activists working in grass-roots voluntary groups. In areas where the numbers of agricultural labourers grew to a critical mass of relatively homogeneous Scheduled Castes, such ameliorative measures proved inadequate to prevent the outbreak of armed struggle. Over extensive areas of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, Naxalite peasant movements were treated as law-and-order problems to be repressed by police and paramilitary forces. By contrast, the expanding urban middle classes, composed of the English-educated upper and Forward Castes, with infusions of individuals from backward communities benefited by reservations, constituted the core of the economically dominant classes in society. During 1984-89, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi stepped up the pace of internal economic liberalization, the incorporation, expansion, growth and profits of private manufacturing companies, specially in TVs, telephones, scooters and electronic goods reached record levels. In the large cities, money (whatever its sources) and high official position (which made it easier to acquire

wealth) began to override ritual rank, including, in some cases, ‘untouchability’ as the basis of social status. An estimated forty millions enjoyed a standard of living comparable to their middle-class counterparts in advanced industrial economies, and another sixty millions were on the threshold of a comfortable middle-class life. The urban middle classes, virtually cut off from the villages in the vast rural hinterlands, exercised influence primarily outside the electoral process, through their personal links to the senior bureaucrats in the IAS, the national technocracy inside and outside of government (constituted by graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology [IITs], Indian Institutes of Management [IIMs] and universities abroad), and the executive officers of private corporations. As India entered the 1990s, a discernible separation was taking shape between economic power and political power. In West Bengal, the propertied classes, whether village-level jotedars or Marwari capitalists in Calcutta, were generally excluded from governance, which was exercised by the disciplined CPI (M) allied with the lower and middle classes. In other states and at the centre, despite the lack of such effective political organization, the lower and middle classes of the Backward Castes were gaining ground in elected political institutions including state legislatures and the Lok Sabha. Still divided by region, community and caste, politicians from the Backward Classes and kisans were groping their way to the creation of a national farmers’ class. The decline of a homogeneous elite, rooted in status hierarchies erected upon devalued notions of purity and pollution, is likely to place even greater importance on access to the huge resources of the managerial state as a basis of rank and privilege in society. The battle for ascendance between the city and countryside, industry and agriculture, bureaucrats and politicians, the urban middle classes and peasantry, landowners and agricultural labourers, industrialists and workers, Forward Castes and Backward Classes, and even advocates of a Hindu state and those of a secular state, are all aspects of the social turmoil accompanying the collapse of the Brahminical system as a source of legitimacy for the unequal social order. The downtrodden— Dalits , minorities and women—have begun to raise the question of which social forces are responsible for the persistence of grinding poverty. They have started to understand the benefits of organization in extracting tangible gains from political parties in return for their support.

The Indian political system may be reformed by adjusting relations between the centre and the states to permit greater decentralization, but in themselves such changes cannot suffice to provide a new basis of legitimacy for the political community as a whole. Politicians in the states may still try to deflect attention from economic issues by blaming New Delhi for the niggardly flow of resources. The upper castes may blame reservations for educated unemployment. Muslims may be accused of extranational loyalties sapping the strength of the Hindu nation. However, such tactics may be increasingly suspect by large sections of the unprivileged and become more and more costly to national cohesion. Social change since the time of the Raj has been initiated by the political process, which, in 1989, empowered almost one-half billion people to vote. Now that they know how to use it, there is little reason to think that this process has run its course.

11 Changing Terms of Elite Discourse: The Case of Reservation for ‘Other Backward Classes’ D. L. SHETH Reservations in government jobs and for admission in educational institutions for the ‘Other Backward Classes (OBCs), i.e., backward castes other than the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), has been an established policy in India and has a history spanning fifty years. The policy, however, is in operation at the state level, with the result that the OBCs have so far not been able to avail themselves of the benefits of reservation in central government services, the Union Territories (UTs), the public sector, and some states in which the lists of groups of OBCs qualified for the benefits accruing out of reservation have not yet been prepared. There has been a long-standing demand for a centralized policy in this sphere, because in the Constitution of India there are specific provisions concerning reservation. 1 The Government of India appointed the First Backward Class Commission in 1953, but shelved its report. The implementation of the policy was left to the discretion of the state governments. Several states appointed their own Backward Class commissions which prepared lists of beneficiary groups and recommended varying percentages of reservation for the OBCs. Most Indian states, with the exception of West Bengal, Rajasthan, Assam and the north-eastern states have, till date, followed their own specific versions of policy towards the OBCs. In 1979, the Government of India appointed the Second Backward Class Commission, popularly known as the Mandal Commission (after its chairperson's name).

Its report, submitted in 1980, has so far remained in a state of suspended animation, having been neither accepted nor rejected by the central government. In 1989, V.P. Singh, then prime minister, announced his intention of implementing the Mandal Report, thus redeeming a promise made in the election manifesto of the Janata Dal (JD)-National Front (NF) coalition which took power after the 1989 general election. A small fragment of the report was, in fact, implemented by a government order, providing for the benefits of reservation in central government and public-sector jobs to those groups which appeared in the lists of various states, and in the list of the Mandal Commission, as Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC). This new policy was greeted by violent agitation in a number of urban areas in northern and western India by university and high-school students. A wide cross-section of academics and journalists lent support to the agitation which led to tragic acts of self-immolation by some student protesters. 2 As a direct consequence of these disturbances, the government order was held in abeyance pending the verdict of the Supreme Court of India not only on its constitutionality, but also, more generally, on the procedures adopted and recommendations made by the Mandal Commission.’ This paper attempts to understand why a well-established social policy of affirmative action is now sought to be repudiated, particularly by India's intellectual elite, and how public discourse on the issue is being shaped by them to this end. Such an analysis will necessarily reflect on the broader issue of the role of social policy in the process of structural transformation. 3

Terms of Discourse of the Dominant Elite The Mandal Report has a number of things to say that are clearly controversial. For example, is its figure of 52 per cent constituting the country's ‘backward’ population, in addition to the SCs and STs, valid? Is it justifiable to include those traditionally and socially backward groups in the list of beneficiaries which have acquired a share of political influence and some economic amelioration since Independence, by virtue of their ability to take advantage of opportunities to participate in democratic politics and

to take advantage of the benefits of state policies in the spheres of land reform and the Green Revolution? At a different level, questions were raised about the motivation behind Prime Minister V.P. Singh's suo moto declaration extending job reservations up to 27 per cent to OBCs in central government services and public-sector establishments. Would it be correct to equate it with, say, the political expediency underlying Indira Gandhi's use of Garibi Hatao (Abolish Poverty) as a political slogan, or her decision to nationalize fourteen mainstream Indian banks? Conversely, could a decision of this kind, which had been systematically postponed since the early 1950s, ever be taken by a political leadership at the centre without being motivated by political expediency? Indeed, all these questions involve considerations of procedures and modes of implementing a policy which is embedded in the Constitution and has been repeatedly affirmed by all major political parties in the country. Healthy debate on such issues, even when a general consensus prevails, is the stuff of democratic politics and could be expected to contribute to the government pursuing the right course of action in the implementation of policy. Students and intellectuals agitating against the Mandal Commission Report in 1990 did not appear to share this view of the democratic process. Their aim was to question the validity of the very policy of affirmative action as a means of dispensing social justice to groups which have been systematically prevented from access to means of social mobility by tradition and history. The undermining of such a policy was achieved through violent agitation with the support of the intellectuals, who have sought to alter the very nature of political discourse in India on the role of social policy in the structural transformation of the society. Strange indeed are the ways of elite politics in India. Marked by a wide gap between profession and practice, between the rhetoric of ‘national concern’ and the pursuit of sectional interests, elite politics has become adept at obfuscating issues which pose a threat to its power and privilege. It would be politically naive and academically simplistic to assume that the opposition of the elite to the Mandal Report is really focused on the methodology adopted by the Mandal Commission in identifying beneficiary groups or on the method that should be followed in implementing its provisions (Ritupriya 1991; Desai 1991). The elite response to the Mandal Report, indeed, illustrates the ‘wordy opposition’ of the Indian elite which

mouths ‘progressive’ rhetoric in order to oppose any social policy aimed at the structural transformation of our society. ‘They (the elite) have no hesitation in denouncing their caste or the distinction of high and low castes, so long as their social group based on traditions, ability and manner is left unaffected’ (Lohia 1964: 96). Social policy, unlike the economic policies of the state, is scarcely formulated in such clear terms as to include concrete goals or ‘targets’. Instead, it relies heavily on the prevailing climate of opinion among the intelligentsia and works through piecemeal legislation aimed in the general direction of goals which a modern polity sets for the society. In this sense, the arena of social policy making extends beyond the institutions of the state into the processes of opinion making in society. The political discourse, often set by the intellectual elite, thus becomes a vital source of legitimation for social policies initiated by the modern state which constantly seeks bases of its legitimacy in society. The elite, in their self-proclaimed role as ‘modernizers’, also seek to compel the state—which is guided primarily by the needs of governance rather than those of transformation—to adopt policies and enact legislation which it would otherwise prefer to leave well alone. In such a situation, the intellectual elite tend to define their roles in autonomous terms, and seek to influence public opinion through the media on important issues of social transformation. It is this role of the modernizing elite which, during the early years after Independence, contributed in no small measure to the passage of laws in spheres such as the Hindu Code and the abolition of zamindari and private moneylending, etc., in the face of concerted opposition from entrenched interests in society. Five decades since Independence, a new generation of modernizing elite has come into being. Their relationship with the state has altered significantly. A large section of them has moved closer to the state, which they view as being the primary agency of modernization in Indian society. A tiny segment of the modernizing elite has, however, aligned itself with popular movements struggling for civil rights and social justice, which the dominant segment fears are retrogressive forces undermining the stability of the state. This differentiation is largely due to a high degree of politicization of the mass of the people, who have in the past three decades come to play a vital role in the process of shaping the political discourse on issues directly affecting their lives. In effect, the state-orientated elite are generally

opposed to social policies advocated by popular movements which pose a threat to the power and influence derived from their role as norm-setters and pacemakers of social change. Whereas the modernizing elite, in the immediate aftermath of Independence, saw themselves as autonomous mediators between the state and society, their counterparts in contemporary India have shaped their roles as active collaborators of the state. Their rationale for supporting or opposing social policies is rooted in considerations of ‘governance’ and ‘stability’, rather than in those of social change and transformation. The state, for its part, is more dependent on the modernizing elite than on other mediating mechanisms of democratic politics (e.g., political parties, trade unions, etc.) for the ‘software’ of legitimation. This dependence has enabled the state to turn a deaf ear to the demands made by popular movements and concentrate its energy on accommodating the sectional interests of the dominant elite through appropriate social policies. With the degeneration of political mechanisms which used to mediate between the state and society, and the weakening of the relative autonomy of the modernizing elite in this sphere, popular movements have tended to place less and less reliance on the discourse of political and social transformation which developed out of the efforts of the former to spearhead change at Independence through the Constitution. Popular movements have, in recent decades, shown an increasing tendency to engage in direct action in order to pursue their aims. In effect, the institutions of liberal democracy have been rendered incapable of dealing with issues of social transformation within a rational-political framework. In responding directly to these pressures arising from changes at the base of society, the state has come to rely more and more on its coercive power. The segments of the intellectual elite, aligned with the state, perform self-assigned tasks of manufacturing ‘good reasons’ (e.g., maintenance of ‘stability and progress’) why the state should suppress popular movements. Even the demands made on the Indian state within the institutional arena of democratic politics (e.g., through elections and the activities of parties) have tended to reinforce the world-view of the dominant elite and to emphasize its primary responsibility for governance. Demands made on behalf of disadvantaged segments of society in terms of equity, justice, and dignity are subordinated to the pursuit of power reflected in the muscle

power of political parties. The result has been to step up the level of violence from election to election, and to increase the volatility of the electorate. Political parties can no longer count on their traditional bases of support in the electorate. The dominant elite—consisting principally of intellectuals, the media, and the intelligentsia (the latter characterized by activists in certain movements as ‘privilegentsia’)—have sought to counter the weight of numbers against them by appropriating the entire discourse on social policy, perhaps in the secure knowledge that the state relies almost exclusively on them for ideological sustenance and legitimacy. No wonder then that they now wield influence in the state which is out of all proportion to the magnitude of their number or to the authority that they enjoy in society. They are neither accountable electorally to the people, nor institutionally to the state. Yet the legitimacy of the state, which is accountable to the electorate, is being eroded steadily because it derives inspiration for its social policy from the dominant elite. The close alignment between the state and the dominant elite contributed to a perpetuation of the status quo in the social sphere. A process of ossification seems to have set in, specially since the early 1980s. With the weakening of the institutions of democratic politics in general and the party system in particular (Kohli 1989), the state has surrendered its right to set the terms of the discourse on social transformation to the dominant elite, who have totally alienated themselves from the language of the aspirations of the mass of the people. On one hand, their views on such questions/issues as the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), the National Policy on the English Language, the Mandir-Masjid (Temple-Mosque or Ramjanmabhoomi —birthplace of Lord Ram) dispute, and (since August 1990) the Mandal Commission Report have begun to appear less and less credible and devoid of any moral authority. On the other hand, social movements of various kinds have been able to seize new spaces in the arena of public discourse on these and related issues. A section of the intellectuals has lent its support for the expansion of these spaces. This has given rise to an important differentiation—even division—among the intellectual elite. A large section of these, with its dominant ethos oriented around the state, has remained implacably wedded to the logic of governance, whilst a smaller section, which still continues to operate on the margins of political

discourse dominated by the former, has aligned itself with the transformative agenda of social movements. In this process of differentiation, the perspective of the dominant elite on issues of social transformation has significantly changed in the course of the past five years. Its present task is to redefine the terms of political discourse on these issues.

Secularism, Nationalism, and Reservation: Changing Elite Perspective Any attempt to understand the nature of the support that agitations against the Mandal Report have received from the intellectuals and journalists (contrary to the assumption that this vocal minority is socially ‘progressive’ in orientation), must begin with an analysis of the change that has occurred in the general perspective of the dominant elite since the beginning of the 1980s. Central to this change is the emergence of a new but as yet incipient concept of nationalism, incorporating the positions adopted by a large segment of the dominant elite on such apparently diverse issues as the role of the English language in India (Sheth 1990a), Muslim Personal Law, the Ramjanmabhoomi -Babri Masjid conflict and the Mandal Report. The impact of the change of perspective of the dominant elite on some of these issues (and secularism and nationalism in particular) on the recent debate on reservations is considered in this section. The idea that India is a mosaic of pluralities of religions and cultures, and that secularism consists in the state remaining equidistant from them all was evolved in the course of the struggle for independence; it was given political expression in the policies of the government of independent India. This general orientation seems to have lost its appeal for a sizeable section of India's dominant elite today. The chapter on Fundamental Rights in the Constitution emphasizes the importance of this idea through a commitment to secure the interests of minorities in the new post-Independence political dispensation. Based on the principles of equality of all (irrespective of caste, religion, role, or gender) before law, and in respect of access to public resources and opportunities for public employment, the state was expected to follow policies aimed at the protection of socially vulnerable groups from traditional forms of exploitation and oppression in order to enable them to

participate, on an equal footing with others, in the nation's political and economic life. Thus, the Constitution explicitly recognized the principle of equality not only between individuals, but also between groups qua groups. This was done through guarantees pertaining to religious freedom, cultural rights, and protection of the interests of minorities (Sheth 1990b). Furthermore, the Constitution even seemed to make an exception to the principle of equal opportunities for all by means of special provisions discriminating in favour of ‘socially and educationally backward classes’. This was not put forward as an exception to the rule, but rather as a policy measure in the very direction of bringing a measure of equality as a countervailing force against structural inequalities and discriminations endemic in Indian society. 4 In other words, political equality would remain an empty ideal in the eyes of the Constitution makers, unless conditions for social equality were created as a matter of deliberate state policy. A concept of secularism and of nation building was embodied in this approach. The Constitution allowed the right to form associations and organizations for such purposes as professing, practising, and propagating religion, advancing the interests of caste or religious communities, and for the maintenance of cultural identities. Secularism, thus, meant allowing free play in public life to various cultural or religious entities, the state maintaining a posture of strict neutrality. Accordingly, the role of the state vis-á-vis various religious groups and organizations lay not in banishing them from the public sphere, but in treating them as equal, and studiously refraining from showing any preference for one over the other. Such a principle of secularism was translated into politics in which conditions would be created under which the different parts of India's plural society could take part in an open and competitive democratic process. It was believed that, under the influence of democratic norms, the various segments of society would relate to each other and to the state in accordance with new political equations. Thus, participation in politics was seen as directly contributing to a process of nation building in which the ‘nation’, a political community comprising all Indian citizens, was also a community in which the various constituent groups maintained their cultural distinctiveness and separate identities. Briefly, the idea of secularism, as expressed in the Indian Constitution and as articulated over the years through the political process, was embedded in the concepts of equality and democracy rather than in the Western concept of secularism

which (in principle) offers religion no space in the public sphere (thus, in effect, undermining the cultural rights of a minority). This particular brand of secularism, admittedly, was an invention peculiarly suited to conditions under which a democratic state was being established in a multi-ethnic society. In recent decades, the post-Independence brand of secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution has been attacked and sought to be redefined by ultra-secularists and Hindu nationalists alike. The latter seek to link secularism with majoritarian (i.e., Hindu) cultural nationalism, and by the same token, de-link it from the idea of equality of individuals and groups in public life. In this process, the concept of national integration, for which the Congress movement strove before Independence, has been divested of its democratic and egalitarian content and injected with a powerful dose of unitary nationalism. In the Indian context the concept of secularism thus refurbished is not only ahistorical in character but also legitimizes Hindu (i.e., majority) communalism in the name of nationalism. As such, it cannot serve as the basis for a functioning modern state in a multi-ethnic society. It tends to marginalize the minorities politically, and prevent them from playing a full part in the mainstream of national life. The ultra-secularists, on the other hand, would appear to have drifted away from pluralist democratic values. They also reject the more pragmatic orientation of secularism in favour of a much more purist and formal version of the concept which flies in the face of Indian reality. In my view, both the Hindu nationalists and the ultra-secularists have undermined the claims to equal citizenship of the deprived and disadvantaged segments of society (in the religious hierarchy and also in the market place), as well as of minority groups which are prepared to assert their political equality, but are by no means ready to give up their cultural identity in the process. Embedded as it was in the values of democracy and egalitarianism, nationalism was widely regarded (until the late 1970s) as a means of creating a political community in which the life chances of the historically segregated and isolated communities, as well as religious minorities, would be equalized. In other words, the task of national integration was seen as being a process of bringing diverse communities into the national mainstream not only by extending the rights of citizenship to all, but also by giving special protection to the socially vulnerable sections of the society, which would enable them to exercise their political rights effectively.

The aim of state policy was to protect the hitherto deprived and ‘excluded’ populations and safeguard their interests, in tandem with the natural growth of secular forces through the expansion of the national economy, the market, and the elaboration of competitive politics. The new elite's understanding of these priorities, in sharp contrast to that of its forebears, stems from a sharply contrasting assumption, namely, that safeguards for the minorities and socially vulnerable groups are no more than obstacles in the course of nation building under the aegis of ‘secular forces’. Implied in such an understanding is a concept of the nation as a unitary and vertically-integrated ‘national’ society. Two diametrically opposed principles are thus in competition with one another in the pursuit of the common goal of bringing about a cultural homogenization of Indian society. In order to achieve this end, one strand relies on the principle of Hindutva, whilst the other seeks to promote a more rapid process of modernization based on the principle of ultra-secularism. Debates on such apparently disparate issues as the role of the English language in India, Muslim Personal Law, conversion to other religions, and reservation are clubbed together at one level, in a political discourse that has been altered to suit the new ideological orientation to nationalism of the dominant elite. 5 At another level, the Hindu nationalists and ultrasecularists are competing with one another in mobilizing political support for their respective (and opposing) strategies of vertical integration. This new ideological version of nationalism has tended to obscure the relationship between the state and the minorities, and also the status of religious freedoms and cultural rights guaranteed under the Constitution. The dominant elite have also changed their minds about the meaning of federalism in the Indian context. This issue is increasingly presented in an emotionally charged way, equating centrism with upholding India's unity and integrity. ‘Federalism’ is no longer, amongst the dominant elite, discussed in political terms (i.e., in terms of evolving a just and viable division of administrative, financial, and judicial powers between the centre and the states), capable of bringing administration closer and making development programmes more accountable to the mass of the people. The loading of the concept of ‘federalism’ no longer gives a place of importance to the task of managing the social and economic contradictions accompanying rapid socio-economic change. The entire debate about decentralized structures of political and economic power capable of

deflecting and dispensing an overload of political problems at the centre has been recast in an unhelpful and distorted terminology which lays emphasis on the need to fight centrifugal forces in order to maintain India's ‘national unity’. The dominant elite have, as a consequence of these ideological shifts, profoundly altered their view of the poor and vulnerable sections of society. Poverty is increasingly blamed on the poor people's failure to create wealth! At the same time, poverty is delinked from issues of distributive justice. Discussions of rural development nowadays emphasize to a greater and greater degree the need to increase agricultural productivity and obtain higher prices for farm products. The earlier concern for land reform and fair wages for landless labourers has receded into the background in most parts of the country. Conflicts over resources, and the resulting problem of violence, are no longer seen by the dominant elite in terms of restoring the rights of the poor and dispossessed: they are increasingly seen as problems of overpopulation, or, simply, as law-and-order problems. Over the last five decades, the very same dominant elite, who at the time of Independence were seen as trustees in the management of the new system, cast in the mould of relatively autonomous, progressive, and modernizing forces, are now viewed as self-servers and usurpers of national resources.

The Logic and Illogic of ‘Merit’ and ‘Numbers’: A Policy Discourse In the wake of the agitations against the Mandal Report, a section of the dominant elite has attempted to redefine the concepts of ‘poverty’ and ‘backwardness’. Indeed, the argument in favour of using ‘economic criteria’ for affirmative action is based on such redefinitions. There has been a considerable shift in the perspective of the dominant elite on the subject of nation building in India, of which these reformulations are a part. Just as poverty has been redefined to mean poor people's failure to create wealth, the phenomenon of ‘backwardness’ is also viewed in purely economistic terms. Thus, the issues of poverty and backwardness are no longer seen in their structural setting or political and social contexts. The specificity of the Indian situation has been lost sight of, which is characterized by economic

backwardness resulting from social stagnation and governmental neglect, which had their origins in colonial rule. Sociologically speaking, poverty in India is, essentially, a group phenomenon. It is, in large part, a characteristic of groups. It is the consequence of their social backwardness, and not its cause. The source of backwardness is the unjust and iniquitous status system which has, over a very long period of time, systematically prevented the ritually low-ranking caste-groups from acquiring any significant role in the systems of knowledge, political power, and economy. The rapid progress of modernization and development (specially since Independence) has resulted in groups in the upper echelons of the social hierarchy appropriating a disproportionate share of the benefits of change. Groups occupying the lower echelons of the social hierarchy, with little or no access to knowledge and political power, have not been able to reap the benefits of change and have been left even more vulnerable than in the past. The unevenness of distribution of the benefits of change in the different layers of the social hierarchy has been further heightened by the yawning chasm between a stagnant and virtually homeostatic structure, on one hand, and on the other, the powerful impact of cultural and economic influences from without. New dichotomies and contradictions are introduced into the old social structure, the ongoing dialectic sharpens and extends an already existing polarity of opposites. The new dualism separates the rich and the poor not only in economic terms, but also along social and cultural parameters (Kothari 1988: 55-71). Despite changes taking place in the economic and political structures, this apparently ineradicable division in society is reflected in the weight given to the idea of ‘merit’ which is invariably compounded with notions of social status. ‘Merit’ is viewed as an inherited ‘virtue’ of the upper-caste/class groups, and is counterpoised against ‘numbers’, which are generally represented by groups occupying the lower rungs of society. In such a context, democratic assertion by the socially deprived but numerically strong groups of their democratic political rights is seen by the dominant elite as a destabilizing influence. This state of affairs constitutes a lamentable scenario for those genuinely concerned about national integration or secularism or democracy. Even though the use of economic criteria for identifying beneficiaries of the policy of reservation may offer an approach to policy that is neither anti-non-secular nor ‘casteist’ in character, it has failed to register any

significant impact on India's traditional structure. This has contributed to a weakening of the roots of modernism, secularism and democracy in India. The use of social criteria, on the other hand, would enable groups occupying a low status in the traditional hierarchy to overcome structural obstacles militating against their social and economic mobility. Affirmative action based on social criteria is, thus, more than an instrument for restoring social justice to groups that have been wronged in the past. It is a policy mechanism addressed to the future. It mediates the impact of modernization and development, not just for the groups occupying socially disadvantageous positions in society, but for the system as a whole through equity and justice to all. The policy of reservation based on social criteria does not disregard merit: it frees the concept of merit from the mystique of inherited social status. In other words, a policy of reservation opens the possibility that the acquisition of merit may be spread throughout the society, including the vast segments that have been prevented from joining the race because they were held back by their low social status. It is true that the interests of the poorer segments of socially high-ranking castes will not be well served by such a policy. However, unlike the ritually low-ranking caste groups, the economically disadvantaged segments of the upper castes are not in that situation as a consequence of their castes. Nor do they have to confront hurdles to their social and economic mobility comparable to those faced by the low-ranking groups: quite the contrary. They are facing problems of deprivation and lack of access to jobs and education as members of an educationally and socially ‘non-backward’— indeed, advanced—collectivity. They may be victims of a sick, nonperforming economy, but they are not hampered by their position in the social structure which leaves their high status intact. The state as well as non-state agencies have an obligation to ameliorate the harsh living conditions of the poor who are not backward in the sense in which these terms are used in Indian political discourse. But affirmative action in these instances per se cannot bring about alleviation of individual poverty, which is often a by-product of the development process itself. The socially handicapped backward castes, in sharp contrast to their socially advantaged counterparts, cannot improve their positions even in an efficiently performing economy without direct measures such as reservation, which are essential to enable them to overcome structural

barriers to mobility. It is for this reason that the policy of reservation does and ought to give greater emphasis to social rather than to economic criteria. Being guided by economic criteria to the exclusion of social criteria will result in a complete negation of the very principle of equalizing opportunities in a society in which the life-chances of vast swathes of the population continue to be determined predominantly by their location in the traditional system of social stratification. 6

Mandal Recommendations and the State Governments: The Politics of Reservation It is worth reminding ourselves that reservations for the OBCs are part of a larger social policy, which is now in clear danger of being undermined (or even discarded) by the dominant elite with the approval of a segment of the intellectuals. New terms of discourse on such important issues as nation building, secularism, social justice, poverty and backwardness are being introduced in the place of old ones in the pursuit of this overall objective. Stout resistance to such attempts has been offered by those intellectuals and social activists who continue to be committed to the larger policy of affirmative action. In view of the unequal nature of the struggle between the two sides, the issue of reservations for the OBCs has had to be virtually transferred from the larger policy frame into the sphere of direct action. In order that the debate triggered by the anti-Mandal agitations may serve the cause of healthy political discourse, it should consciously seek to benefit from feedback and sensitize the implementation of the policy to potential snags which need to be ironed out. The debate should address questions relating to choice of values, principles, and policies aimed at social transformation. In order to realize such an objective, the issue of OBC reservations stirred up by the agitations should be placed in the larger perspective of the social policy as a whole that has been evolved since Independence (Sheth 1987). The policy comprises a series of acts of legislation, ameliorative programmes and preferential schemes designed to benefit those weaker sections of the society that are described in the Constitution as such. The ensemble of reforms has evolved over a long period of time and has been administered both by the central and the state governments. Although some aspects of these policies have their roots in the pre-Independence period,

the present set of policies derive their legal status and legitimacy directly from the Indian Constitution. The overall package, now in operation, addresses three sets of policy goals. 1. Ending of social and religious disabilities suffered by certain specified groups (namely, SCs and STs) by virtue of their social segregation and spatial and cultural isolation. 2. Facilitating and promoting equal participation of all socially disabled and disadvantaged groups (including the OBCs) with the others in the organized sectors of the country's economic and political life, by means of provisions for preferential treatment in education, in government employment, and through other ameliorative measures and schemes generally designed to improve the opportunities for advancement of the former. 3. Protecting , through necessary legislative action and executive orders, all these (i.e., weaker) groups from all forms of social injustice and exploitation. Reservation, along with other measures to protect and uplift the weaker sections, should thus be viewed as only some of the instruments of social policy at the disposal of the state. It addresses a long-term goal of creating a civil society by extending effective citizenship rights to large sections of the population which have been deprived and marginalized through large swathes of history. In the articulation of these goals, social policy has widened its scope and enlarged its content. Reservation is one of the many avenues that have opened up in the pursuit of an equitable social policy. A series of laws (e.g., the Untouchability Offences Act of 1955; Protection of Civil Rights Act [subsequently amended and tightened] of 1976, the amended Criminal Tribes Act of 1952 removing the legal disabilities suffered by the so-called ‘criminal tribes’, and legislation to end forced labour) have been passed to further the cause of social justice. Protective laws have also been passed preventing alienation of adivasi lands, regulating moneylending, and providing debt relief and legal aid to the weaker sections of society. Besides, there are schemes and programmes for land allotment, housing, scholarships, subsidies, etc., aimed at providing

physical security for and promoting the occupational mobility of these groups. The most controversial aspect of this overall policy is, however, the provision of reservation for the OBCs. Although this provision is based on the same values and rationale that inform the other areas of the policy package, its direct and adverse impact on those not belonging to the beneficiary groups (who have to face intensive competition for scarce jobs and educational places) gives reservation a high-profile visibility that is to its detriment. Even though the Constitution contains a clear stipulation that reservation should cover the OBCs also (where they are not adequately represented in government services), specific measures of implementing reservation for them (unlike the case of the SCs and STs) could be passed only after commissions appointed for the identification of the need for them reported. Two such commissions have so far been appointed by the centre: one in 1953 and another in 1978. Yet, this particular area of the policy (namely, the provision of reservations for the OBCs in the central government services and public-sector jobs) has not so far been implemented (Limaye 1990). The OBCs comprise, by and large, the lower rung of the Shudras, who, in the past, have suffered from varying degrees of ritual prohibitions applied to the a-dvijas (literally, those not ‘twice-born’) and remain today socially and occupationally disadvantaged. With about fifty years of reservation policy behind them in Tamil Nadu and certain other parts of South India, and with land reforms and the Green Revolution, only a small proportion of the Shudras have risen to higher levels of economic well-being in comparison to the vast majority of the OBCs. Accordingly, a number of such groups of Shudras have been included in the lists of beneficiaries in the Mandal Report. Even so, a few such communities in the southern states, which would not qualify by the criteria adopted by the Mandal Commission, continue to be shown on the list of beneficiaries, at least in the region. Although their inclusion in the reservation list was justified when the scheme was started, their social and educational conditions have since improved to such a degree that they are no longer economically disadvantaged. In the northern and western states too, there are some communities identified by sociologists as ‘dominant castes’ that are included in the reservation lists. They have acquired political clout by virtue of their numerical strength, but,

by and large, they continue to remain backward in social and educational terms. In these states (unlike the southern states), reservation for OBCs is of recent origin and the quantum of reservation offered is much smaller in proportion to their numbers. Viewed from the national or the state levels, the OBCs today constitute a far more (economically and educationally) heterogeneous category in comparison to the SCs and the STs. On one hand, the OBCs include some of the dominant castes of agriculturists both in the North and the South. Yet, on the other, they comprise a wide array of socially and economically deprived groups which suffer at least as much (if not more than) the SCs and STs. These include the so-called ‘criminal’ tribes (stigmatized as such during the colonial period), nomadic communities, converts to Islam, Buddhism and Christianity from the SCs, as well as a whole range of minor castes subjected to a condition of ‘relative untouchability’ and engaged in caste-bound marginal occupations. The need for a national policy of affirmative action covering all the OBCs cannot be exaggerated. Such a policy should be sensitive to differentiation among the OBCs (and between the OBCs, on one hand, and SCs and STs on the other), and their heterogeneous character which has ramified further in recent decades. The Mandal Commission Report (1980) contains recommendations for action by the centre to improve the opportunities for advancement of the ‘other backward classes’. This would be a role similar to that being performed by it in relation to the SCs and STs. Based on criteria suggested by a panel of experts and a research committee consisting of the leading social scientists of India, the Mandal Commission produced lists of beneficiary groups which would be eligible to benefit from its recommendations. The proportion of the OBCs thus identified by the commission was estimated at nearly 52 per cent of the total population. But in order to keep the total reservations for all categories within the limit of 50 per cent (a limit set by the Supreme Court), the Mandal Commission recommended only 27 per cent reservation for the OBCs, with a proviso to the effect that those states in the South which had already made reservations above the 27 per cent limit not be affected by this recommendation. This was an anomaly, because the benefits of reservation would continue to be enjoyed by a number of groups (specially in the southern states) which have, over the last five decades, improved their social and educational positions far beyond the level attained by the general run of OBCs. The

Mandal Commission's acceptance of the status quo in this connection has given rise to considerable confusion. Whilst the Mandal Commission Report was accumulating dust on the shelves of the central government, several state governments took the initiative of appointing their own Backward Class commissions. Thus, for example, the state of Gujarat appointed its own second commission on the subject in 1981, taking a cue from the Mandal Report. It recommended an increase of 18 per cent reservation for the OBCs, thereby raising the quantum of existing reservation for them from 10 per cent to 28 per cent, thus keeping the total percentage of reservations in the state within the prescribed limit of 50 per cent. That increase had to be withdrawn in the face of violent and persistent agitation. Prior to this, agitations had taken place in Bihar against the state government's belated implementation of a diluted version of Gujarat's policy towards the OBCs. Since then violent agitations, inspired by the intellectual and political support received from the dominant segment of the elite, have been fomented in order to frustrate any further implementation of the larger policy of affirmative action. Since the mid-1970s, antireservation agitations have successfully stalled not only further implementation of the policy, but also any rationalization or modification that might make it more effective. With the Mandal Commission Report still in a state of suspended animation, there are no reservations for any category of OBCs in central government services and public sector jobs. Other measures to improve their opportunities for advancement and living conditions are not even discussed. No such provisions exist in states such as West Bengal, Assam, Rajasthan, the UTs, or the north-eastern states. Except in the South, where the extent of reservation for OBCs is more or less proportional to their size in the population, the quantum of reservation in states where appropriate provisions exist for the OBCs, is much less than the suggested 27 per cent. For entrance to educational institutions in most states, the standards for the OBCs are only slightly lowered (by marks of about 2 to 3 per cent). 7 The agitations have ‘succeeded’ in another way too. They have created an acute fear of conflict among those segments of the dominant elite which are accustomed to thinking of ‘cost-free’ solutions to problems; they adopt a rhetoric of social change which leaves no room for clashes of interest inevitably entailed in such changes. Instead of preparing the state to meet

such conflicts in a businesslike fashion, they would rather retreat to the safer ground of preserving the status quo ante. An honest and effective measure to implement a transformative social policy—be it the removal of untouchability and preventing atrocities on Dalits , land reforms, or reservations—is bound to generate conflict. There is no guarantee whatsoever that the status quo on such issues will not be disturbed. In reality, issues that are at one time solvable within the legalrational framework of a policy process are allowed to fester and are pushed into the arena of direct action. The groups not well served by the status quo, on one hand, and those wanting to preserve it, on the other, then take the issues to the streets, away from the legislature and the administrative apparatus of the state.

Crisis of Affirmative Action The anti-reservation agitation has brought to a head a demand that has been continuously advanced by the upper-caste elite since 1953, namely, alteration of the very basis of the present system of classification of beneficiaries. This demand obviously affects not just the OBCs, but also the SCs and STs. The crux of the argument advanced in support of this demand is that ‘secular’ criteria should be used for the identification of the beneficiaries in need of affirmative action. More specifically, it is a plea to make poverty or economic backwardness of individual households the criterion for the basis of selection of beneficiaries in place of the present complex criterion based on social disability and disadvantage of caste groups qua caste groups. Any social policy that takes cognizance of feedback received from the democratic process—including elite political discourse—should give serious attention to the demand for a change of criterion in order to determine how the beneficiaries should be identified. Can social policy be revised in order to accommodate such a demand without undermining the basic principle of affirmative action? First, neither the Constitution nor the theory of affirmative action would permit the application of economic criteria to the exclusion of all others (or even of the dominant ones) in deciding on reservation. But from both these perspectives, caste can be used as a primary, though by no means an exclusive criterion for the identification of beneficiaries from among the OBCs. Furthermore, in view of the heterogeneous character of the category

of OBCs, social criteria can be legitimately combined with such economic criteria as income, education, occupation, etc. There is no constitutional impediment here because the courts have frequently offered interpretations of the rather ambiguous phrase (namely, ‘socially and educationally backward classes of citizens’) used in the Constitution to describe the OBCs, based on a concurrent application of both the ascriptive position of the OBCs and the objective facts relating to them. In reality, in a number of states, e.g., Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, beneficiaries are identified at the individual household level from among the OBC communities on the basis of standard economic and educational criteria. This means that only deserving individuals or households within the OBCs identified as socially and educationally backward, and not the OBCs as a whole, are entitled to preferential treatment. This aspect of jurisprudence extant on the issue of OBC reservations can be brought to bear upon the implementation of the Mandal Report with a view to removing the snags in the overall policy. In this connection, the policy of reservation for the OBCs, as applied in Bihar, may be relevant. In Bihar, the OBCs are divided into two categories, namely, ‘backward’ and ‘extremely backward’. From among the ‘backward’ groups, identified as such primarily because of their low-ranking ritual status, specific households of beneficiaries can be selected by using a means test. The category of ‘extremely backward’ castes comprising socially, economically and educationally undifferentiated groups (as in the case of the SCs and STs), social (to the exclusion of other) criteria can be used and benefits extended to them as groups. It is not an appropriate time, however, for extending the application of economic criteria and social criteria jointly to the cases of the SCs and STs, for even the tiny section among them which has improved its economic condition has had to withstand continued social pressures of an unsavoury kind. There is abundant empirical evidence to show that wherever persons belonging to SCs and STs have improved their economic positions (specially in rural areas), caste Hindus have unleashed violence on them. Reservations allow the SCs an escape route out of the life of social terror in rural areas to the anonymity of towns and cities through education and government employment. For them, economic and social disadvantages are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. They are poor because their status is abysmally low, and in order to divest themselves of their status disability,

they have to move out of poverty. When they begin to move out of poverty, they become targets of violence. Thus, for the SCs and STs, as well as the extremely backward among the OBCs, the exclusive application of social criteria must be continued, at least until their status disability ceases to obstruct their social mobility. As for the other segments of the OBCs, the application of a means test to individuals would be appropriate after a complete evaluation of their ritual status and the precise level of the social, economic, and educational backwardness of the collectivities themselves. Such preferential treatment for the socially deprived and historically marginalized communities must continue until the basic goal of bringing significant numbers from the lower social strata of the population into the professions, white-collar jobs and government service is achieved, or until the opportunities for advancement of individuals in society as a whole are randomized across social groups and cease to be determined systematically by the application of ascriptive criteria.

Notes 1 . While Article 15 prohibits discrimination between citizens on grounds of race, caste, sex, or place of birth, Clause 4 of this article states that this prohibition ‘shall not prevent the state(s) from making any special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward class of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes’. More specifically, while Article 16 affirms equality of opportunity in matters of public employment, Clause 4 of this Article states that ‘nothing in this article shall prevent the state from making any provision for the reservation of appointments or posts in favour of any backward class of citizens which, in the opinion of the state, is not adequately represented in the services of the state’. 2 . For a good insight into the factors underlying the wave of self-immolation during the anti-Mandal agitation (1990), see Mohan (1991), Sethi (1991), and Nemishrai (1991). 3 . Since the writing of this paper, the Supreme Court has handed down a somewhat noncommittal verdict which clearly reveals its disinclination to be drawn into political issues. However, a final verdict on this case is still awaited. The effect of this interim order has been to stay the implementation of the order issued by the National Front government, and to seek clarification from the present government on its policy with regard to the recommendations of the Mandal Report. In particular, it has raised the question of putting into effect economic criteria for reservation for OBCs (including the non-SC, non-ST, and non-OBC poor) in the ‘reservations net’. 4 . See Article 29 of the Constitution under the heading ‘Protection of Interests of Minorities’. Whilst the Constitution uses the term ‘minority’ in Articles 29 (1), 30, 350A and 350-B, it does not define it. In essence, the term refers to any section of citizens with a distinct language, script, or culture. In Article 30, the phrase ‘all minorities

whether based on religion or language’ is used. In any event, the cultural rights of a minority are enshrined in the Constitution as a Fundamental Right. 5 . Viewed in this way, it should not be difficult to understand why a large section of the liberal intellectuals and journalists with a secular orientation, the ranks of the RSS, and the BJP and Congress (I) politicians purveying their different visions of India in the 21st century found themselves united in supporting the anti-reservation agitations (Desai 1991). 6 . For a micro-analysis of how agricultural modernization has not made any significant impact on the social structure of the village, and failed to promote occupational and social mobility of households located at the lower rungs of the village social structure, see Swaminathan (1991). 7 . Data on percentages of marks required for entrants to professional courses to students belonging to OBCs in relation to those belonging to the general category are contained in Limaye (1990: 63).

References Desai, M. 1991. ‘The Need for Reservations: A Reply to Shourie and Others’, Lokayan Bulletin , 8: 9–33. Kohli, Atul. 1989. Democracy and Discontent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kothari, R. 1988. State Against Democracy. New Delhi: Ajanta Publications. Limaye, M. 1990. ‘A Democratic Weapon’, Seminar , 375: 58–63. Lohia, R.M. 1964. The Caste System. Hyderabad: Navahind. ———. 1984. ‘Towards the Destruction of Caste and Clan’, Samat Era 3 (8–10): 8–13 (reproduced from Lohia 1964: 95–105). Mohan, D. 1991. ‘Imitative Suicides?’, Manushi , 63-64: 69-72. Nemishrai, M. 1991. Abmadah Sanskriti: Udbhav aur Vikas (Hindi). New Delhi: Lokayan. Ritupriya. 1991. ‘Critique of a Critical Appraisal’, Lokayan Bulletin , 8 (4–5): 101–6. Sethi, H. 1991. ‘Many Unexplained Issues: The Anti-Mandal “Suicides” Spate’, Manushi , March-June: 63–64. Sheth, D.L. 1987. ‘Reservation Policy Re-visited’, Economic and Political Weekly , 22 (46): 1957–62. ———. 1990a. ‘No English Please, We are Indians’, Illustrated Weekly of India , pp. 34– 37. 19–25 August. ———. 1990b. ‘OBC Reservations: A Constitutional Right’, Illustrated Weekly of India , pp. 32–35. 21–27 October. Swaminathan, M. 1991. ‘Gainers and Losers: A Note on Land and Occupational Mobility in a South Indian Village’, Development and Change , 22 (2): 261–77.

12 Religion and Politics in a Secular State: Law, Community and Gender ZOYA HASAN Over the past decade there has been considerable discussion in India on the complex process of interaction between the state and different segments of the population, the conflicting pulls of secularism and scriptural rules that define gender relations and the tensions between the politics of equality and the politics of difference. Citizenship defined by civic and universalistic rather than ethnic criteria, which guaranteed a principle of inclusion in India's democracy, has been eroded by majoritarian notions of the nation state and by demands for recognition of narrowly based group identity. Both Hindu and Muslim politics have given a central place to gender issues. Women have figured as important signifiers of differences between groups, and sometimes vigorously participated in various communal projects and at other times they have spoken out against it. Gender relations are constituted within the family, community and by the state. They refer to relations of power between women and men which are revealed in policies, practices, ideas and representations, including the division of labour, roles and resources, and ascribing to them different abilities, desires and behaviour patterns (Agarwal 1994: 51). The history of the Indian state and its policies towards women embodies a definable regime of gender relations and its analysis can reveal the potentialities and constraints on equal rights for women. While it would he quite misleading to make generalizations about state intervention, nevertheless, the actions of the Indian state suggest that it is interventionist and protectionist in the material sphere, while it remains non-interventionist in the community

domain, with the exception of intervention to reform of Hindu laws in the 1950s. Until recently, the scholarly literature tended to treat gender, religious, and community identity as static and unchanging. Scholars who study identity construction often focus on the social and cultural domain, rather than on the state. Students of the state, on the other hand, tend to be disinterested in the processes of identity formation (Basu 1998). However, the debate on the quest for gender equality shows that it is untenable to draw a sharp line of distinction between community and state on the question of religion or gender because there are structural, administrative and ideological linkages between the two (Sangari 1995: 3294-96). Religious communities under discussion have been constituted in relation to the state and by political processes connected to the state. Moreover, successive governments have been involved in the internal affairs of religious communities and in the maintenance of places of worship and other kinds of religious establishments. The interface between the community and the state extends most notably to the sphere of law (Hasan 1994). The state has been asked to protect religious boundaries in two different ways: through the demand for the exemption of minorities from the application of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) made by religious spokesmen of the Muslim community, and the demands for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) made by the Hindu right. This chapter focuses on the question of social reform of Muslim Personal Laws (MPL) by unravelling some of the strands in the tangled web of interconnections between community identity, gender and the state. Its specific focus is the process of state intervention in the arena of gender-just laws. My concern is to contextualize and problematize the debate about legal reforms that arose from the controversy over the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill 1986 in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment in the Shah Bano case. The controversy and the legislative enactment which abrogated Section 125 of the CrPC highlight the role played by the state in perpetuating patriarchal relationships and thus in foregrounding community rights over political rights of equal citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution. In particular, two strands of the debate emphasize the relationship of religion and politics in a secular state and the problems of gender justice in this complicated arrangement. Government policies, which continually reaffirm support for practices and institutions that see identity as a code of principles strengthened community identity. In

the realm of civil society, the Bharatiya Janata Party/Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (BJP/RSS) combine, which dominated the debate was opposed to minority rights on the ground that it would erode national unity and legal equality. For the Sangh combine, national unity could best be achieved by curbing minority rights and introducing a UCC that would apply to all communities. These two conflicting positions set the limits on a debate in which women were simply emblematic of differing conceptions of state and nation. This debate played a decisive role in engendering a critique of state secularism and the erosion of the Congress party's legitimacy followed by its displacement from the centre of Indian politics.

Minority Rights and Personal Law There are nearly sixty million Muslim women in India, one of the largest female Muslim populations in the world, but they have made few tangible gains during five decades of economic and social development. They are conspicuous by their absence in the world of politics, in the professions, bureaucracy, and universities and public and private sectors. They do not figure in debates on political empowerment, rural poverty, education, or health; their economic vulnerability does not arouse much concern. The economic invisibility of Muslim women must be viewed in conjunction with their high political visibility, albeit not in their own rights as women but subsumed and then made visible in the debate about minority rights versus minority appeasement, personal law versus uniform laws, secularism versus communalism, and modernity versus communitarian traditions. Much of the debate on social reform centres on the meaning, substance, and importance of legal reforms for accelerating the processes of modernization and national integration (Parashar 1992; Baird 1993). The urge for greater economic and political participation by women and for the protection of their new roles leads inevitably to the search for legal rights. Women's rights are guaranteed in the Indian Constitution but denied in actuality. Legal reform is imperative if women are to achieve a measure of equality. Reforms with regard to property, inheritance, and marriage in Hindu laws, combined with economic and educational advancement, have provided some support for Hindu women's active participation in society. Muslim and Christian women have not been similarly served, however. At stake was the issue of legal asymmetries created by state intervention,

which had changed Hindu personal laws without attempting similar changes in MPL. Personal laws are, of course, only one form of discrimination, but they constitute a significant source of disadvantage for Muslim women. Women's lack of rights in law is crucial in maintaining their subordination to men, and it sanctions their limited access to property and inheritance. The constraints imposed by the political salience of religious divisions was a major obstacle to change in MPL, a full three decades after efforts to reform Hindu personal law. Nehru was reluctant to push reforms that would pave the way for a UCC because he felt his government in the aftermath of Partition should avoid any step that would offend the religious susceptibilities of minorities, especially the Muslims; instead, he wanted to assuage their anxieties regarding their status in independent India. Nehru said, ‘If anybody brings forward a civil code bill, it will have my extreme sympathy. But I confess I do not think the time is ripe in India for me to push through it.’ Although he considered a UCC for the whole country an essential and vital element for national development, the prime minister was apprehensive that any imposition on minorities, without their consent, would be imprudent. Hence, the policy of merging religious communities in a single citizenship remained a pious hope enshrined in the Directive Principles [of the Constitution]. Rather, the state devised policies responsive to cultural differences. But given the changeable nature of cultures, Nehru the advocate of pluralism and accommodation, expected these provisions and concessions to the minorities would be subject to change. He hoped that Muslim communities would, in the fullness of time, respond to the winds of change. Meanwhile, he insisted they should have the right as to when to do so. Nehru's expectations were not fulfilled. The last fifty years have witnessed negligible effort towards reform. The advancement of women's rights was stalled by the Muslim leadership which took shelter under the constitutional provision of minority rights, resolutely opposing the idea of legal reform, apprehending threats to minority culture which ought to be protected by these rights. The provision of minority rights was influenced by the partition of India on religious lines in 1947, especially the aftermath of deteriorating Hindu-Muslim relations. The spectre of communalism hung over the subcontinent when India became independent. The partition meant that Pakistan might become a homeland for Muslims, but India would remain a home for Hindus, Muslims, Christians and others, and though

Pakistan was a Muslim state, there were as many Muslims in India as in Pakistan. One way of facilitating the integration of the minorities was to recognize them as members of religious communities and grant them group rights. Though this was a violation of liberal principles, it was seen as necessary for cultural autonomy. This took two forms: the inclusion in the Fundamental Rights of the freedom of religion and special provisions for the protection of their interests, particularly the right to establish educational institutions to promote their language and culture and receive funds from the state (Smith 1963: 100-34). These rights were aimed at protecting the cultural identity of minority groups and ensuring against their cultural assimilation. In this way, the state hoped to gain the trust of Muslim communities that opted to stay in their country of birth. Still, one issue has recurred: what should be done when the claims of minority cultures or religions clash with the norm of gender equality that is at least formally endorsed by the state, however much it may continue to violate it in practice?

Legal Reform and Retreat of the State This conflict came to a head in the mid-1980s in connection with the famous Shah Bano case. The Supreme Court in a landmark judgment delivered in April 1985, granted a small maintenance allowance to Shah Bano, a 73-year-old divorcee from the city of Indore, to be paid by her husband Mohammed Ahmed Khan under the provisions of the CrPC. Under a provision in it originally introduced in the late 19th century to prevent vagrancy, she appealed for maintenance from her former husband. Ahmed Khan had argued in an appeal to the Supreme Court that since he had fulfilled his obligations under the MPL by paying her an allowance for three months of the iddat period and meher as well, he was not bound to maintain her any further. Barely six weeks before the judgment was delivered, a Private Member's Bill seeking to exclude Muslim women from the purview of Section 125 of the CrPC was tabled in the Lok Sabha. Sponsored by a Muslim League MP, G.M. Banatwala, the bill was clearly in response to the Shah Bano petition and the feminist espousal of her cause. This bill was introduced while her case was being decided by the Supreme Court. The government decided to oppose the bill and Minister of State for Home Affairs Arif Mohammed

Khan endorsed the Supreme Court judgment in Parliament on the ground that Section 125 did not interfere with the personal laws and that these provisions were invoked by destitute women. The Supreme Court ruled that criminal laws overrode personal laws and were applicable to all, including Muslim women. This judgment sparked off an unprecedented political furore. Large numbers of Muslims considered it an assault on the shariat, which in their opinion makes no such provision for maintenance in the event of divorce. Backed by the Muslim Personal Law Board and Muslim leaders, they took to the streets to register their protest and accused the Supreme Court of trespassing on their domain. To soothe ruffled feelings, the Rajiv Gandhi government enacted a hurriedly drafted legislation, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill, 1986. The bill explicitly excluded Muslim women from the purview of the very limited right to maintenance available under the CrPC, to which all citizens otherwise have recourse. The new legislation was an unequivocal response to the controversy aroused by the Supreme Court judgment. It was an attempt by the prime minister to contain the damage done by the judgment and its endorsement by Arif Mohammed Khan, who was roundly attacked by the ulema and the Urdu press for supporting maintenance for Muslim women under the CrPC. To understand why the issue became so very heated, one has to look at the context in which it arose. The 1980s witnessed a sharp rise in communal violence all over the country, both Hindu-Muslim and Hindu-Sikh. Hindu communalism was acquiring increasing legitimacy in the eyes of the state and was further strengthened by the political response to the Ramjanmabhoomi movement seeking to liberate the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The lack of any noticeable opposition to this movement, compared to the outrage against the proposed legislation, left large sections of Muslims feeling vulnerable. The government sensitivity to Hindu sentiments aroused by the campaign for the Ram temple was similar to its concern for Muslim feelings on the Shah Bano case. This was in part because the plot was to accommodate both Hindu and Muslim sentiments: the deal was that Muslims would get the revocation of the court verdict on the Shah Bano case while Hindus would be granted darshan at the Ramjanmabhoomi in Ayodhya.

State Secularism and Muslim Women's Bill in Parliament The debate in the Lok Sabha on the Muslim Women's Bill was conducted within the framework of state secularism, commonly interpreted as equidistance from all religions, more precisely, accommodation of all religions. Defenders of state secularism were sceptical of the possibility of separating religion and politics in a country where religious loyalties often moulded political and social attitudes. This understanding derived its inspiration from a conception of secularism, distinct from the Western notion of complete separation of state and religion. It supported a notion of community rights that gave priority to the community's self-perception and self-determination of its identity and interests. This approach was framed by the Congress government which had always projected itself as the protector of minorities. But the party's claims did not match the government's shaky commitment to secularism in the 1980s. Nor did the party's proclamations of secularism match its performance in uplifting disadvantaged sections of society, including backward classes, Muslims, and women. Far from advocating universalistic criteria of citizenship based on the strict neutrality of the state in its relations with religion, Union Law Minister Asoke Sen argued against cultural assimilation and came out in favour of differentiated criteria of citizenship. He argued against imposing a single cultural pattern in society. Tolerance of diversity and differences should be the hallmark of governance in a multicultural society. Secularism demands that everybody should not be tarred with the same brush. The Constitution sets up a secular democracy not in the way of the uniformity of the grave…. If we start on a fine mosaic and try to draw one single pattern all over the country then we shall be playing absolutely against the very foundation of our philosophy (Lok Sabha Debates 1986: 313).

For the most part, however, the new legislation was justified by government spokesmen on grounds of the sanctity of personal law and its faithfulness to religious law: ‘In fact, this Bill is but a statement of the law as contained in the Islamic law, that is Mullah's authoritative statement of law that has been incorporated in this Bill’, stated Eduardo Faleiro in the Lok Sabha {Debates 1986: 348). The law minister reiterated that MPL was derived from the shariat, and that the Supreme Court judgment granting maintenance to Shah Bano had transgressed the limits of MPL (Lok Sabha

Debates 1986: 318). His interpretation echoed the position of the Muslim Personal Law Board and showed no recognition of how Muslim leaders— many of whom helped to reinforce the government view—were steering issues of religious identity for their own ends. In reality, maintenance for destitute women did not amount to interference in personal law, and minor modifications did not constitute an attack on Islamic tenets. Having uncritically accepted the notion of the divine immutability of the shariat, however, the Congress government was constrained to introduce the Muslim Women's Bill: We have to tread very carefully, for Muslim personal law is linked to the Muslim religion in the minds of most Muslims…. We must look at it from the point of view of Muslims…and then try to find out what is the law which governs the Muslims and which according to them is not merely a law of man's making but a law ordained by God. This is the belief of Muslims (Lok Sabha Debates 1986: 319).

The defining feature of government policy was neutrality in areas that were accepted as being within the religious domain. The core argument rested on the understanding that minority communities have the right to cultural autonomy and that their personal laws need protection. The bill was defended on the ground that it conformed to the wishes of the Muslim community and should be conceded irrespective of the opinion of other communities or society at large (Hasan 1989). Throughout the controversy, MPs referred to Muslims as ‘them and their laws’ as distinct from ‘us and our customs and religious practices’ (Lok Sabha Debates 1986: 411). Muslims were assumed to be an indivisible community, different from others, which implied that there was no other way of dealing with them except through recognition of their religious laws (Baird 1993). As Arun Nehru warned, ‘There would (otherwise) be a law and order situation and this is one problem which no police force or paramilitary force can solve satisfactorily’ (ibid.: 411). K.C. Pant, Minister of Steel, cautioned ‘extreme care’ in dealing with Muslim personal law and argued that the alienation of Muslims would threaten political stability and national integrity. The essence of government policy was summed up in the words of the law minister: ‘If the majority of Muslims feel that the Bill is in their interest we cannot impose our views on them’ (ibid.: 317). Throughout the debate in the institutional and public arenas, government spokesmen stressed the wishes of the minority community and the:

Feelings and beliefs of Muslims and how ‘the Government cannot ignore the voice of Muslims’ because ‘every minority has a guarantee that it could conduct its own affairs: it could have its own way of life; preserve its own cultural identity; its own religious identity; have full freedom to practise its religion and so on’ (Lok Sabha Debates 1986: 516).

In this way, the government established an equation of law, scripture, and community identity as the centrepiece for the integration of minorities into national life. Women's status was a very secondary consideration in government thinking which foregrounds religious identity, and gender identity was immersed within it. Early on, Congress leaders (most notably Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) defended the proposed legislation on the grounds that it would enhance women's interests by giving them a better deal. By May 1986, the Muslim Women's Bill was being debated in the midst of countrywide agitation. The massive opposition against the Supreme Court judgment among Muslims led the government to change its approach to regain Muslim support for the ruling party. The government's response was unmistakably influenced by the crisis that the Congress faced in the mid1980s. A new strategy of conciliation and compromise was devised to stem the steady erosion of Congress support among Muslims, obvious from the losses suffered by it in the bye-elections in the parliamentary constituencies of Bijnor, Kishanganj, Bolpur, Kedrappa and Saiyaganj. Of these, the most significant was the defeat suffered by the Congress candidate Israrul Haque, General Secretary, Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Hind, in Kishanganj at the hands of the Janata Party leader Syed Shahabuddin, a strident critic of the Shah Bano judgment. Compromise on MPL was part of the effort to win back Muslim voters, but this strategy neither resolved the crisis of hegemony nor generated new support among Muslims. On the contrary, the Congress party set in motion a political process—which it then could not control—of compromises with Hindu and Muslim communal politics. As a result, leading political questions concerning the Muslim community and its relationship with the state came to the fore in the late 1980s. There is no doubt that many Muslims were worried that the Shah Bano judgment impinged on personal law. However, this anxiety was translated into fears about the status and future of Muslim identity on account of the agitation mounted by the religious and political leadership. This stirred up emotions through a deliberate obfuscation of the central issue of women's rights and its deflection into minority rights. The consequent displacement

relocated women exclusively within the community. It changed the terms of discourse by raising misgivings regarding minority identity in a secular society. This was the basic thrust of the government discourse too, which defined Muslims and their role and place in polity and society in strictly religious terms. By translating its own assumptions about Muslims into concrete legislation, the Congress government contributed to the strengthening of a Muslim identity in Indian politics. Crucially, the government was not only acknowledging an independently existing identity but recreating and shaping it. Talal Asad (1993: 34-35) has argued that it is not mere symbols that implant true religious dispositions but power, ranging from laws and other sanctions to the disciplinary activities of social institutions; in short, power creates the conditions for reinforcing religious identity. And this could have serious implications for the social and economic development of Indian Muslims. Social reform has often excluded the minorities because the dominant Muslim leadership patronized by the government is opposed to reform, and many liberals also argue that the impulse for reform must originate within the community itself and not the state. The Congress government readily accepted this logic. This was clear from the arguments made by Congress leaders such as K.C. Pant in the Lok Sabha. We cannot depend only on the law of reforms. The society has to be ready for reform. The wellsprings of that reform have to come from within and then the law and sentiment that have been aroused by a certain movement, they coincide and then society moves forward…. Reforms must come from within the Muslim community (Lok Sabha Debates 1986: 390).

For its part, the government emphasized that no change in personal law could be envisaged without the consent of the Muslim community. This, the law minister repeatedly stated, was ‘the position accepted at the time of the adoption of the Constitution’ (Lok Sabha Debates 1986: 516). Compared to other countries with significant Muslim populations, there has been virtually no change in the civil and institutional life of Muslims in India.

Muslim Women and the Majoritarian Discourse The critics opposed to the bill described it as surrender to communal and fundamentalist forces that would ultimately undermine secularism. The entire non-Congress opposition argued against the unconstitutionality of the

bill, which was contravening constitutional articles guaranteeing fundamental rights and thus discriminating between men and women. The Sangh combine mounted the most vitriolic attack against the bill. It capitalized on the lack of reform in MPL to build a critique of the secular state, especially the provision of minority rights. The Sangh assailed the Muslim desire to conserve a separate identity, and demanded that Muslims should shed their special ways of life and culture and accept a UCC. The strident emphasis on the urgency of reform of personal law signalled a new positioning of Muslim women vis-á-vis the secular state and minority rights. Singling out Muslim women as the most oppressed group bolstered the critique of Muslims as a backward community, and of the state as one which not only countenanced this but also perpetrated it through appeasement. The Organiser spoke obsessively about polygyny and how the population problem it creates would upset the demographic balance between Hindus and Muslims (Organiser , 9-16 February 1986). Linked to this was the emphasis on Muslims’ purported proclivity towards violence. Together, these elements created a stereotype of Muslims as aggressive, backward, and communal, and this narrow construction of Muslims comes to define all Muslims (Bacchetta 1994). Muslim women were thus turned into an ideal terrain through which to denounce personal law, the legal inequality between Muslim men and women, and the inequity of Muslim society. The repeated focus on polygyny (thought to be a universal Muslim vice); the state's failure to bring about a UCC even after forty years of independence; the special status of Jammu and Kashmir provided in Article 370 of the Indian Constitution; and Article 30 of the Constitution, which allows minorities to have their own educational institutions, over time got translated into a popular ‘common sense’ about minority appeasement (Organiser , 2 February 1986). In many ways, this familiar story is rooted in a century of revivalist thinking and communal politics (Sarkar 1998). The new and striking aspect was not the denigration of Muslims through such stereotyping, but the way Muslim women were used for a critique of secularism. From early 1986, the emphasis on the backwardness of Muslim personal laws and the oppression and exploitation of Muslim women was displaced by a sharper focus on the problem of secularism. The status of Muslim women highlighted the pitfalls of secularism as practised by the state. The principal target was the preferential treatment of Muslim men and how it constituted a violation of

secularism and equality. The backwardness of Muslim women became the hope for launching the most trenchant critique of the state and its appeasement of minorities. This discursive shift was prompted by the introduction of the Muslim Women's Bill, which generated nationwide opposition within the Congress party, intelligentsia, women's groups, the media, and the Hindu community at large. This inspired the BJP leader L.K. Advani to declare that ‘The BJP is in [a] happy situation in which opposition parties like the Communist Party of India, Communist Party of India (M), Telugu Desam and overwhelming numbers of the Janata Dal and Congress are opposed to the legislation’ (Organiser , 30 April 1986). Noticing that ‘the majority ruling and opposition party members see the legislation as a surrender to Muslim separatism’, the Sangh combine saw in this its main chance to occupy the political space created by the controversy over minority rights. This shift was necessary for the realization of the larger project of displacing the Congress party from the centre of Indian politics. By questioning the secular claims on which its legitimacy had rested in the post-Independence period, it created new opportunities for advancing the political agenda of challenging liberal secular supremacy. The protection of minority rights, an important plank of secularism, was now under critical scrutiny from a wide range of political groups which were showing signs of unease with concessions given to minorities. This unease was interpreted as the most serious crisis of the secular state in post-Independence India, one that opened up possibilities of renegotiation of state secularism. At that point, the status of women was not being contested; rather, it was the relevance and reformulation of the secular world-view. The fundamental importance of the rights discourse therefore lay in its capacity to replenish the ideology of political Hinduism by identifying its critique of minority rights with the emerging national consensus on the distortions of secularism. Most notably, the new discourse underlined the point that the theory of respect for all religions requires their formally equal treatment. The RSS, for instance, argued that it had never demanded any special rights for Hindus. At the same time, it was against making any concessions to religious minority groups and it opposed religious discrimination (Kapur and Cossman 1996). It dismissed cultural diversity by setting the equal treatment of all women in opposition to multiculturalism and secularism. Indeed, any recognition of cultural

difference was considered a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equality. The transformation of these arguments into a national common sense that gained widespread prominence was crucial to catapulting the BJP to the centre stage of Indian politics in the mid-1990s. From then on, the Hindu right acquired unprecedented strength. At no time before this had it received even 10 per cent of the national vote; the average had been 7 per cent. By 1991, however, support for Hindu nationalism was rising rapidly in northern and western India. In this respect, the decision of the Rajiv Gandhi government to amend the criminal laws was an important moment in the party's political expansion because it gave it a remarkable opportunity to simultaneously press its claims on the disputed mosque site in Ayodhya, and to launch its attack on secularism by arguing that national integrity was harmed by the pluralism and protection of minority rights entailed in this discourse. The expansion of Hindutva politics was accomplished by casting aspersions on the vote-bank politics of the Congress party and the need to break the coalition of Brahmins, Muslims, and Scheduled Castes. Existing political arrangements and structures could be delegitimized by claiming that the Muslim vote bank was solely responsible for the distortions in the politics and culture of the nation. For the Hindu right, it was particularly objectionable because Muslims acted and voted in unison, as members of one indivisible community. By contrast, it argued, there was no Hindu vote bank because Hindus were diverse and divided into numerous castes and communities, and were generally tolerant and naturally inclined towards diversity. The argument ignored the historical experience of the creation of the public sphere in India, in which the politics of numbers and voting blocs has been a part of the democratic experience and is central to the strategies of all political parties and communities. In the Hindutva discourse, though, only Muslims think and act in unison. Pandering to the minorities and forging a diabolical alliance with the Muslims were part of a concerted Congress party design to regain its lost supremacy. Rajiv Gandhi was vociferously condemned for succumbing to Muslim vote power and bigotry (Organiser , 6 April 1986). The only way out of this quagmire of minority appeasement was a UCC to end the special privileges of Muslims (Basu 1998). Feminist legal scholarship, however, shows that the Hindu right's accent on a UCC appears fairly mainstream because it capitalizes on certain fault lines in the legal regime.

The demand for a UCC is articulated within the discourse of formal equality. When the Hindu right argues that all women must be treated equally, they mean that women should be treated the same as Hindu women…. Dominant traditions in Hindu in Indian law, as much as [the] Hindu right's proposals are based on treating women differently than men. Women are different than men and need to be protected from men. The discourse of equality is at one and the same time being used to reinforce the idea that all women are or should be the same, as well as the idea that women are not and should not be the same as men. Two models converge to allow the Hindu right to delegitimise the recognition of religious and cultural difference without challenging the assertion of natural gender difference (Kapur and Cossman 1996: 256-57).

Gender Justice and the Limits on State Intervention What explains the reluctance of the state to intervene in the sphere of personal law, even though it possesses a readymade constitutional mandate to do so? During the past decade, many in India have asked why action has not been taken to bring about the fulfilment of the constitutional ideal of equality. There are two kinds of problems at issue here. One pertains to the Indian interpretation of secularism, and second, the conflict this creates between the conflicting claims of cultural communities and women's rights of equal citizenship. The Indian state is based on a constitution whose secular character has been reaffirmed by an amendment to its Preamble. The adoption of secularism carried an implicit denial of religion, but in reality the Indian state is remarkably sensitive to religious authority and religious sensibilities. Unlike liberal democracies, which restrict religion to the private sphere, India devised policies premised on a ‘principled distance’ between government and religion. The founders of the Indian Constitution recognized that under Indian conditions certain exceptions to the universal criteria of the liberal state had to be made both to ensure national unity and to provide equality under the law for all citizens. Thus, state intervention was required in areas impinging on religion (depending on social context) to safeguard the group rights of minorities against assimilation by the majority culture. These rights consisted of religious freedom, including the right to worship, propagate and practise one's religion. Minority rights were not limited to non-discrimination between various communities. They encompassed the freedom to establish religious, cultural and educational institutions of their choice, and minority institutions would not be

disqualified from receiving state funding. State intervention allowed Muslims to retain their family law. This created an aberration in the very notion of equal citizenship. The basic problem is obvious. If it was accepted that the state could intervene to provide equal rights to women of one community, i.e., the majority community, then what was the ground for not doing the same for others? The answer is essentially pragmatic: equality of citizenship is important, but the political leadership reckoned that respecting religious sensibilities was more important, and minority rights shielded them against state interference. This has meant that legal reforms could be initiated only when the communities were ready to accept them. It is undoubtedly true that large sections of Muslims are apprehensive of change in personal laws, but large sections of Hindus, too, had been opposed to the codification and reform of Hindu law. The point is that in the 1950s the Hindu community was just as unprepared for divorce as the Muslim community is for monogamy. The government used its latitude to reform Hindu law, and in a sense used the same latitude to allow the preservation of personal laws which claimed religious sanction. Such legal discrimination against any other group would not be tolerated on religious grounds; for example, the state has passed laws against untouchability (Parashar 1992). The makers of the Constitution believed that the constitutional right to equality would be reinforced by the social policy of equality. This belief informed the policy of affirmative action for the Scheduled Castes, which sought to reinforce equality as a right with public support for equality as a policy. When it comes to rights of women, equality as a right is enshrined in the Constitution, but with no support for gender equality as a policy. Though the state is theoretically committed to ensuring the rights of its citizenry, it has been constrained by the dilemma of whether to support reforms from above or reforms from within. Significant initiatives to reform personal laws have been thwarted as often by the state as by pandits, mullahs and priests. The legal reform of personal law becomes a bargaining counter for the state, which retains the power to decide whether or not to reform the personal law of any community. The second issue concerns the question of citizenship in situations in which it is possible to construct more than one identity for members of the same community. In the case under discussion, religious and gender identities of Muslim women were counterpoised to each other giving rise to

a tension between the claims of cultural communities versus women's rights of equal citizenship (Jayal 1999: 145). Keen to safeguard community identity, the state discourse obscured completely the question of gender justice. On an issue that essentially concerned women's rights, the most notable feature was the marginalization of women's voices. Throughout the debate, the government ignored the opinion of Muslim women who would be directly affected by the legislation. The government simply failed to take into account the dissent within the community. It constructed a homogeneous conception of the community, which assumed a unified response of outrage against the judgment. This is despite the fact that many Muslim women actively participated in the campaigns organized by women's organizations against the bill. Muslim women's opposition was a significant feature of the protest against the bill in Kerala, West Bengal, Bombay and Delhi, where the rights of indigent women were reaffirmed in public meetings and mullahs (Muslim teachers or interpreters of Muslim law) were derided for turning religious law into an instrument of injustice (Hasan 1993). In Delhi, 1,500 Muslim women participated in a rally organized by the All India Democratic Women's Association. The campaign culminated in a spectacular protest with hundreds of women chaining themselves to Parliament on the day the Muslim Women's Bill was passed. The Opposition asked why the government chose to disregard the views of Muslim women who demonstrated in the streets. The government justified its position by stating that it was ‘the consistent policy of the Government that in matters pertaining to the community, priority would be given to the leaders of the community’ (Lok Sabha Debates 1986: 516-18). This argument assumed that Muslims constitute a self-contained and monolithic community whose interests are represented by Muslim MPs and a section of the ulema. It completely avoided the issue of the lived experience and aspirations of Muslim women. At issue is a contextualized notion of citizenship in which community identities are paramount, in contrast to notions of equality before law, equality of opportunity, or equality of treatment (Mansfield 1993). This paradox arises because the recognition of religious differences in the application of law can violate the constitutional guarantee of equality, yet the denial of cultural diversity can violate the spirit of secularism, which postulates equal respect for all religions. There was very little concern for women's rights as non-negotiable, regardless of faith (Jayal 1999: 149).

This neglect was reinforced, as much by state policies, as by the political salience of religious divisions in society. The primacy of community rights over citizenship endorsed by the state in the passage of the Muslim Women's Bill willingly limited the application of even criminal laws to exclude citizens from the rights available to others. In the absence of a reformed divorce law, Muslim women were unequal vis-á-vis men and were now rendered unequal vis-á-vis women from other communities who have access to the law in respect of maintenance. The primacy given by both the Muslim community and the state to the recognition of cultural rights compounded their vulnerability, often because identities of gender and minority overlap to their detriment. It is hardly surprising, then, that the passage of the act has led to an avalanche of oral talaqs from husbands wishing to free themselves from the liability of maintenance. Till the act became law, Muslim women continued to file cases under Section 125 for maintenance. The immediate aftermath of the act, however, witnessed a significant decline in the number of maintenance cases filed by Muslim women in 1986-87 (Jayal 1999: 138-42). To be sure, the conflicting claims of minority cultures and the norms of gender equality do not lend themselves to an easy reconciliation (Beteille 1998). Most cultures are suffused with ideologies and practices concerning gender that can be punitive and violate their individual member's rights. Personal laws impose internal restrictions, which limit the rights of members to question the traditional authorities and practices. Above all, it denies women rights that communities claim for themselves vis-á-vis the state: autonomy, selfhood and access to resources. As Susan Moller Okin points out, the way a culture treats its women is of considerable importance (Okin 1997). Given the disparities of power between the sexes, the more powerful male members are those who are generally in a position to determine the group's beliefs, practice and interests. By privileging community rights over the principle of equal rights, minority rights often reinforce existing hierarchies and gender inequalities within the group by restricting individual choice in the name of cultural integrity. It underestimates the potential for cultures and communities to change and yet survive. A culture, as Bhiku Parekh argues, encompasses a lot of things, such as how one should live, relate to one's fellow humans, and find meaning in one's life (Parekh 1997: 36). It is thus a mistake to link culture solely or judge it even primarily in terms of one aspect: personal laws. A

great deal of state paternalism is embedded in the claim that, in order to retain their distinct identity, Indian Muslims must preserve their traditional laws. It presupposes that while ‘we’ can survive change, can endure the duality created by modernity, ‘they’ cannot.

State, Community and Gender In the larger body politic, gender construction, identity formation, and citizenship continue to be formulated within the rhetoric of binary opposition. Salient among these is universalism/difference; uniformity/plurality; state/community. Rather than accept them as a logical and necessary opposition, these categories need to be historicized and subjected to closer scrutiny. Women's groups have attempted this by taking a fresh look at the process and mechanics of gender construction, especially the role of the state in this process. From the 1940s until the early 1980s, there was a general consensus that the state should introduce gender-just laws for all communities. This was part of the larger understanding that the state ought to play an important role in progressive social and political transformation. However, by the mid-1970s, this consensus broke down with the economic and political crises of the state, engendered by the failures of development planning and socialism. This period saw a significant growth in women's participation in mass struggles on every front. The mass discontent brought about a radical rethinking in the women's movement on the role of the nation state (Agnes 1994). The reluctance to universalize women's rights was illustrated by the pragmatic compromises of the state and its complicity in encashing religious difference. Not surprisingly, there was growing disquiet with stateinitiated legislation in the areas of marriage, divorce, maintenance and inheritance, including the Hindu Code Bill. The reform of Hindu laws did challenge the religious elite, but it culminated in the promulgation of laws that are not entirely just to women. The decisive shift came with the dramatic growth of the BJP in the late 1980s, which appropriated the UCC—historically, a feminist demand—as a rhetorical device to attack minorities. This became a source of political discomfort for feminist groups, championing women's rights. Many women's groups, which previously supported uniform legislation, jettisoned uniformity in favour of gender-just laws. More broadly, women's groups

have moved in the direction of re-examining established practices and lacunae in all laws, including the Hindu Code, in the light of the requirements of equity and justice. While agreeing with the principle of gender justice, many feminists question the means and strategy required for reform of personal laws. Overall, greater priority has been given to the notion of women as individual citizens with inalienable rights. The goal of gender equality will be difficult to achieve in a multicultural society unless inter-group and intra-group equalities are seen in some ways as related struggles. Justice within groups is as important as justice between groups. Individual freedom should not be interpreted in purely legalistic terms, in a parallel way; cultural groups should not limit civil and political liberties of individual members. The legitimacy of a new legal regime should be based on a secular and democratic horizon that seeks justice for women within a wider egalitarian project (Sangari 1995). Such laws can be made only from a non-religious location, and they would have to take into account both similarities and differences, find ways of preserving diversities, but without special immunity from the requirements of equity and justice. In the event of conflict between equal rights of citizenship and community agendas, such a project would require the state to jettison the protection of inequalities and its constitutional endorsement of personal laws.

References Agarwal, Bina. 1994. A Field of Ones Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agnes, Flavia. 1994. ‘Women's Movement within a Secular Framework’, Economic and Political Weekly , 29 (19), 7 May: 1123–28. Anveshi Law Committee , Hyderabad. 1997. ‘Is Gender Justice Only a Legal Issue? Political Stakes in UCC Debate’, Economic and Political Weekly , 32 (9 and 10), 1–8 March: 453–58. Asad, Talal. 1993. ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz’, Man , 18: 183. Bacchetta, Paula. 1994. ‘Communal Property/Sexual Property: On Representations of Muslim Women in a Hindu Nationalist Discourse’, in Zoya Hasan (ed.), Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India . New Delhi: Kali for Women, and Colorado: Westview Press. Baird, Robert (ed.). 1993. Religion and Law in Independent India . New Delhi: Manohar. Basu, Amrita. 1998. ‘Hindu Activism in India and the Question it Raises’, in Patricia Jeffrey and Amrita Basu (eds), Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and Politicized

Religion in South Asia . New York and London: Routledge. Béteille, Andre. 1998. ‘Conflict of Norms and Values in Contemporary Indian Society’, in Peter Berger (ed.), The Limits of Social Cohesion: Conflict and Mediation in Pluralist Societies . Colorado: Westview Press. Hasan, Zoya. 1989. ‘Minority Identity, Muslim Women Bill Campaign and the Political Process’, Economic and Political Weekly , 24 (1), 7 January. ——. 1993. ‘Communalism, State Policy and the Question of Women's Rights in Contemporary India’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars , 25 (4), October: 5–15. Hasan, Zoya. (ed.). 1994. Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State . New Delhi: Kali for Women, and Colorado: Westview Press. Jayal, Niraja Gopal. 1999. Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India . New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kapur, Ratna and Brenda Cossman. 1996. Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India . New Delhi: Sage Publications. Kishwar, Madhu. 1994. ‘Codified Hindu Laws: Myth and Reality’, Economic and Political Weekly , 29 (33), 13 August: 2145–67. Kozlowski, Gregory C. 1993. ‘Muslim Personal Law and Political Identity in Independent India’, in Robert Baird (ed.), Religion and Law in Independent India . New Delhi: Manohar. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lok Sabha Debates . 1986. Fifth Session, Eighth Lok Sabha, Vol. 1, XVII. New Delhi: Government of India. Mahajan, Gurpreet. 1998. Identities and Rights: Aspects of Liberal Democracy in India . New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mansfield, John. 1993. ‘The Personal Laws or Uniform Civil Code?’, in Robert Baird (ed.), Religion and Law in Independent India . New Delhi: Manohar. Okin, Susan Moller. 1997. ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’, Boston Review , 22 (5), October–November: 25–28. Parashar, Archana. 1992. Women and Family Law Reform in India . New Delhi: Sage Publications. Parekh, Bhiku. 1997. ‘A Varied Moral World’, Boston Review , 22 (5), OctoberNovember: 35–37. Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1987. In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State . Mumbai: Orient Longman. Sangari, Kumkum. 1995. ‘Politics of Diversity: Religious Communities and Multiple Patriarchies’, Economic and Political Weekly , 30 (51), 23 December: 3287–310. Sarkar, Tanika. 1998. ‘Women, Community, and Nation’, in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds), Appropriating Gender , pp. 89-104. London: Routledge. Smith, Donald Eugene. 1963. India as a Secular State . Princeton: Princeton University Press. Som, Reba. 1994. ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code: A Victory of Symbol over Substance’, Modern Asian Studies , 28 (1): 165–94.

PART V

13 ‘I am the Government Labour Officer…’: State Protection for the Rural Proletariat of South Gujarat 1 JAN BREMAN Introduction ‘Where are you working today? How much do you get?’ The agricultural labourer, completely taken aback, hesitates before answering these questions which are put to him so aggressively. We have overtaken him on a country road, and my companion has to shout loudly to make himself heard above the sound of the motorcycle, but we stop our vehicle when we hear that the man earns only five-and-a-half rupees a day. The briefcase is opened to bring out the forms, and now we begin to fill in yet more facts. A stamp pad appears, and the agricultural labourer's thumbprint guarantees the accuracy of the information he has given us. Content at having recorded yet another case of underpayment, we ride on in search of our next victim. Today I am touring my fieldwork area with a Government Labour Officer (GLO). Gujarat is one of the states in which the government claims to make vigorous efforts to improve the conditions of those who, in official jargon, have fallen behind in the development process. In this context, agricultural labourers form an important target group, and several years ago a separate government agency was set up specially for them, to supervise compliance with the law on minimum wages. A rural labour commissioner based in Gandhinagar heads the organization, which has its own offices and personnel in every district with a high percentage of the landless. Surat in South Gujarat is one of these concentration areas. According to the last

census, in 1981 Surat's agricultural labourers comprised 54.6 per cent of the agrarian workforce. With a total number of 281,025, the size of this class is larger than in any other district of Gujarat state. In the fertile and densely populated agricultural zone upon which I have centred my current research —three talukas in the central plain—their percentage rises to 80 or even higher. Such an overrepresentation is quite exceptional in India. In twelve out of the thirteen talukas in the district, there is an assistant government labour officer under the command of two senior officers who man the headquarters in Surat city. 2 Most officers have motorcycles, and each of them is expected to spend at least twelve days of every month in the field making a total of 200 inspections. Besides this, they hold sessions one day a week in the office of the taluka administration to hear labourers’ complaints and farmers’ reactions to these. Within the governmental bureaucracy, a division of labour has developed between the officials responsible for industrial labour relations, whose work is mainly limited to visiting the establishments and industries within urban locations, and their colleagues who are almost entirely concerned with agricultural labour in the countryside. This exclusive preoccupation on both sides is not only detrimental to the interests of wage labour in the urban informal sector, but also produces a situation in which employment in large sections of the rural economy escapes any kind of official control. All kinds of activity outside agriculture, but still rural in nature, lie beyond the reach of the labour inspectorate, even where the law has declared a minimum wage for the work. These are my first critical observations on the governmental claim that the special provisions introduced offer effective protection for the very large landless class in the South Gujarat countryside. Life in these households can only be understood by recognizing that work in agriculture is only one of their sources of income and is far from always being the main source. For this reason alone, it would be better to talk of a ‘rural’ rather than an ‘agrarian’ proletariat. Certainly, where Surat district is concerned, rapid economic growth goes hand in hand with a steadily increasing diversification of the rural economy as a whole (Breman 1985: Ch. 2). It is clear from my current research into off-farm employment that the government has absolutely no interest in the labour relations prevailing in, for example, brick-fields, stone quarries and stone crushing units, road

construction, to name but a few of the employment sectors for which legal regulations have been in force for several years. Admittedly, beginnings are never easy, and one could look on the situation of a separate inspectorate for agricultural labour as a promising step towards better control of labour conditions in the rural milieu. In that case, I am all the more interested in the way this agency works and in the results achieved. With this in mind, I have made repeated visits to the head office, and whenever the opportunity has arisen, I have gratefully accepted invitations to accompany the government labour officers on their rounds in the district. We had already met several times before today's trip. Although this has gone some way towards allaying my companion's suspicions, he still does not quite know how to behave in my presence. I do my best to leave the initiative entirely to him, and show myself perfectly willing to follow in his footsteps, keeping as low a profile as possible. ‘Please go ahead and do what you would normally do, as if I weren't here.’ My fellow traveller clearly has reservations about this; the idea that I shall be monitoring all his actions at rather close quarters for several days does nothing to put him at his ease. The tension never entirely disappears, although he becomes accustomed to my presence after a while. Once on the road, I ask him about the current wage rate in this prosperous area. ‘Yes, well…it's somewhere around the official minimum wage, and at the moment that's nine rupees for an eight-hour working day, sometimes even a bit more in the peak periods.’ My guide tells me that at present the farmers pay six rupees in cash, supplemented with two meals, or else seven or eight rupees with some food, a cup of tea, and a few cigarettes thrown in. It soon becomes clear that these figures are incorrect, and in fact on this particular day we will not meet a single agricultural labourer who receives as much as he should for his work. In passing, it is interesting to note that in their first contacts with outsiders, labour officers tend to maintain that there is hardly any discrepancy between what is legally prescribed and what is done in practice.

Control Among the Landless The inspection has something of the nature of a raid into hostile territory. The GLO selects his clients at random, but those we stop on the road are

seldom anything other than agricultural labourers. His long experience enables him to identify members of this class even at a distance. After first putting a few opening questions, he makes himself known. ‘I am the government labour officer….’ As a rule, those with whom he is talking do not seem to be very happy about the encounter. Any contact with a representative of the government, specially by the roadside, unprepared and outside any kind of a group situation, is best avoided. Still, most of them answer the GLO's questions meekly and to the best of their ability. The government official radiates authority in his bearing and gestures, and he acts in a manner calculated to compel respect. From the road, he beckons to labourers working in the field. If they dawdle as they come over to us, he urges them irritably to hurry up. Right from the beginning, the conversation is conducted on a footing of inequality and takes the form of an interrogation. Sometimes the questioner turns abruptly to another worker, paying absolutely no further attention to his previous respondent. The vast majority of agricultural labourers say they earn five or five-and-a-half rupees, or even less if they are given a meal as well. Their accounts are invariably consistent with the data I collected during my current fieldwork in this region. The GLO never questions the information given, but now and then shows irritation if respondents are unable to answer any of his queries. Some cannot give the father's name of the farmer for whom they are working, while others do not have even the vaguest idea of their own ages or of how long they have been working for the same boss. Yet almost everyone can tell me exactly how much the official minimum wage is, whenever I ask this in the margins of our conversation. At the end of every interrogation, the GLO unceremoniously grabs each informant's thumb and presses it, inked, on to the completed form. Their illiteracy is taken for granted. Without another word, let alone with any kind of explanation to the labourers, the GLO gets back on his motorcycle. Yet not all of our respondents resign themselves to the confrontation so meekly. One boy herding a few cattle is so unnerved by the questions being fired at him that he takes to his heels after a few minutes. With one leap he is over the hedge and running away as hard as he can across the field without once looking back, escaping from his ‘protector’. It strikes me that the agricultural labourers who have had the chance to prepare themselves for the interview with us are somewhat more reserved about giving

information, yet an answer that is obviously meant to be evasive is not necessarily less reliable, for all that. Q: How much do you earn? A: That depends on the season. Q: Yes, but what is the daily wage at present? A: Today I'm working on contract (udhad) . Q: With which farmer? A: That depends. Sometimes with one, sometimes with another. Q: How many hours do you work? A: Sometimes from before dawn until after sunset, but sometimes only half a day or no more than a couple of hours. This kind of detail, although it gives a very realistic picture of the agricultural labourer's day-to-day life, is too complicated to be caught accurately in a straightforward questionnaire. The GLO soon abandons his attempts to record this case. Without cooperation you can't do much, he sighs. Farm servants in permanent employment are remarkably loyal to their masters. One of them, a tractor driver, gives the figure of Rs. 200 for his monthly wage, without realizing that this is still less than he should be paid on an annual basis. Grumbling, he ‘signs’ his statement. He vainly tries to prevent us from questioning his co-driver by telling us that it has not yet been decided what this casual labourer will be given at the end of the day. Although I know that this is not unusual, the GLO refuses to accept the story and the co-driver, a seasonal migrant from another state who keeps silent because his Gujarati is not very good, also gets a summons. This is meant quite literally, because the way in which we are working unintentionally gives the impression that it is the agricultural labourers rather than their employers who are at fault . At all events, the reactions of the people we are interviewing foster this assumption. After we have been on the go in this way for a couple of hours, my guide suggests that we visit the agricultural labourers in their own neighbourhood. The next village which we enter is in the centre of his official domain, but he tells me that he has never been into the slums where landless labourers live. Only the wife is at home in the first hut we visit. She says that she earns five-and-a-half rupees a day—when there is any work for her at all. Her neighbours’ answers are no different, and the forms are filled in one

after the other. When a respondent is unable to answer the GLO's question about age, a rapid glance suffices for a rough guess at this. The arbitrary classification into a few age categories—twenty-, thirty-, forty-five-year-olds, and so on—that is found in so many government statistics, is taking place before my very eyes. We are sitting on the charpoy (a rope-bottomed bedstead), the only piece of furniture in this one-room dwelling. A government official definitely does not sit on the floor, eye-toeye with his audience. Meanwhile, the man of the house has arrived. After we have been through his own testimony, he is assigned the job of arranging for a steady stream of respondents from this locality. One by one they enter through the opening serving as a door and remain standing as they submit to the interrogation, then disappear again as soon as they have signed the form. In a few moments the GLO manages to create an office atmosphere in this small, dark space, behaving like a senior officer summoning his subordinates before him to present their reports. No one dares to ask what all this is about. Naturally, in the neighbourhood we are big news. The landless have assembled in small groups. No one dares to count on deriving any benefit from our presence. The majority of those talking it over afterwards think that the information they have given could well be used against them. After all, isn't that always the case? It is a rather disturbing prospect, because who can afford to be marked down as a troublemaker? Others, specially the women, who are fiercer and more embittered than the men, reason that there is nothing to be gained by hiding the truth. The hutment colony is rather crowded at this time of the day. The usual interruption in the work between twelve and two o'clock only partly explains this. Even if we were to come earlier or later in the day, we would find many of the landless at home. The peak period of the agrarian cycle has passed, and when labourers report for work early in the morning, at this time of the year (January), they are often turned away by the farmers, because there is no work for them to do. The casual labourers are told this, day after day, in the quieter winter months. Moreover, it often happens that the local landless are excluded from the work which is still available. A large proportion of the cultivable land is planted with sugarcane, and the cooperative sugar factories have brought in a great number of labourers from far away for the duration of the harvest campaign lasting from the beginning of December until May. These migrants live and work in gangs.

Their temporary camps consist of tent-like shelters made from a few woven mats; they are spread over the entire region and are a marked feature of the landscape around this time of the year. They will disappear at the end of the cutting season. 3 The sugar harvest workers constitute only part of the huge army of migrants. The individual farmers can also count on the labour of a great many additional workers, coming from other parts of the district or far beyond it, who have made the trek to the plains to profit from the plentiful supply of work in the peak period of the year. They move around in gangs of between five and twenty workers, both male and female. Many of them appear to have settled down indefinitely in the villages on the plains. Lacking dwellings of their own, they bivouac in the immediate vicinity of the farmer's house—in the compound, in the byre with the cattle, in the loft —where they are employed as farm servants or maids. The migrants who are given shelter in a pump house or a field shed far outside the actual village, remain completely invisible. The local landless trace a direct link between both their own underpayment and their chronic unemployment, and this reserve army of cheap labourers which has invaded the region in ever-increasing numbers over the past two decades. Even though, in principle, the outsiders also fall within the purview of the minimum wage legislation , the government leaves them undisturbed and unprotected. However clear it may be that the arrival, temporary or permanent, of several hundreds of migrants in each village has sharply increased the vulnerability of the local rural proletariat, policy makers and bureaucrats do nothing to put a stop to this influx of migrants. One of the agricultural labourers we are interviewing openly questions the point of filling in so many forms when nothing ever comes of them, and dares to suggest that we would do better to spend our time on the problem created by the presence of so many migrants. The persistence earns him a sharp reprimand from the GLO. How could anyone who is illiterate think of taking an official to task, telling him how he should be performing his job? It is obviously time to leave.

Visiting the Farmers The GLO confides to me that in half-a-day he has filled in enough forms to complete more than his week's quota, and suggests that we should pay a

visit to the farmers in the village. He impresses upon me that it is unwise to place too much reliance on information deriving from one party alone. For the sake of objectivity, it is necessary to get to know the other side as well, and develop understanding for the employers’ viewpoints. We go straight to the house of the village sarpanch (headman), whom my companion has already met on earlier visits. The sarpanch himself is not at home, and his wife invites us in, without much enthusiasm, to wait for him. A small boy is dispatched to fetch the police Patel, who materializes a few minutes later and is given the task of bringing several farmers to us. The GLO reads out their names from the forms he has just filled in. We stay behind, alone, in our host's front room. The lady of the house returns to her kitchen, and neighbours who otherwise turn up very quickly when strangers are visiting the village, keep away on this occasion. Our halt at the landless labourers’ part of the village, located on the outskirts, has not gone unnoticed by the employers. The identity of these uninvited visitors was undoubtedly conveyed to them while we were still talking to the labourers. The farmers can well do without a meeting, particularly as we have violated the unwritten rules by not presenting ourselves to them right at the beginning. Who is this official who has taken it into his head to overlook the landowning elite and to establish direct contact with the rural poor, going in search of the landless who are hidden away in the inaccessible parts of the village? To kill time, I chat with the farm-cum-house servant who is bringing us tea and snacks. He is all praise for his master and begins to catalogue all the extras he receives. Besides the tea and food that he is allowed to take home with him at the end of each day, he is also given old clothing and shoes, money for the doctor and medicines in case of sickness, or when his wife is giving birth, small loans when he asks for them, and so on. Nonetheless, calculating all this on an annual basis, his wages and bonuses together still add up to less than the Rs 3,200 which a farm servant ought to be earning, in accordance with the minimum wage legislation. At this point in our conversation, the GLO begins to fidget restlessly on his chair. He tries in vain to suggest that the employer might not be paying out part of the daily cash wage, but keeping note of it as a balance in the servant's favour. On the contrary, quite the reverse is true: it is the farm servant who has been in debt to his boss for many years. I wonder out loud if we are not confronted here with a case of bonded labour, according to the letter of the law. The

GLO hastily brings out a new questionnaire, to record this umpteenth case of underpayment—in duty bound to do so, even though we both know that he will do nothing further with it. Yet it is a painful moment to be enjoying hospitality. The lady of the house appears from the kitchen to ask indignantly what all this is about, and makes sure that the servant leaves the room. After half an hour of waiting, the police Patel comes in, herding a couple of farmers before him like cattle gone astray. None of them is on the GLO's list. All the listed farmers just happen to be absent from the village today or have pressing business. However, the replacements the police Patel has found are prepared to talk with us in a general way about government regulations on labourers’ wages. In their view, this kind of interference has an absolutely negative effect on agriculture, since it is not the landless but the landowners who are the weaker party. It's a pretty upside-down world in which the government protects the worthless ones of society who have no sense of responsibility, rather than taking the producers’ side. I suggest cautiously that nine rupees for an eight-hour working day is really not very good pay. It is barely possible for one person to survive on it, let alone to share it with the non-working members of a household, who also have to live. Two kinds of argument, mutually conflicting, are advanced against this view. In the first place, there is the denial that labour is grossly underpaid. Totally at variance with the statements by the agricultural workers with whom we have spoken, the farmers continue to maintain staunchly that the wages they pay do entirely conform with the legally prescribed rate. Admittedly, they do not give the full amount in cash, as the law says they should, but even the labourers themselves do not want this. If one were to add up all the payments made in both cash and kind, one would arrive at an even higher total figure than the nine rupees a day. They are providing their subordinates with nothing less than total care! In that case, why is it that the majority of agricultural labourers in this village are in such a miserable state, in spite of this guaranteed livelihood? Well, say the farmers, that is their own fault. It is what comes of immoderate drinking and other vices, but particularly of their refusal to work in the way they should. And here we have the second argument heard among landowners in every conceivable variation. Whenever the agricultural labourers have to make ends meet on so little money, this is only the consequence of their own careless behaviour. You can never rely on them. A farm servant who comes

one day, stays away the next day without giving any reason. Isn't it therefore logical that the farmers in their turn send labourers away if there is no need for them? Apart from the fact that they arrive late and leave early, it cannot be said that they work even reasonably well during the few hours they spend in the fields. They are always complaining: it is too cold on winter mornings, too hot on summer afternoons, and in the monsoon it rains too hard for their liking. Any employer who still pays the full daily wage is not only injuring himself but is also putting a premium on behaviour that cannot be tolerated. It does not help matters when I remark that it is strange to hear this censure of the labourers’ boundless laziness from the lips of landowners. Their fathers were accustomed to working hard themselves on the land alongside their labourers, in contrast to the present generation, which shuns any form of physical labour. My comment falls on stony ground with these members of the dominant caste in the region. Their prosperity and upward social mobility have been achieved to no small degree by exploiting their subordinates to the full, and they have no qualms about their anti-labour stance. The GLO has remained largely aloof from the conversation, but when he does join in, it is to supplement and illustrate the farmers’ point of view. He feels clearly much more at home in these surroundings than he did a short while ago in the labourers’ company. The attitude he adopts is that of an ordinary official who is only carrying out his superior's orders. Is it his fault if his instructions conflict with the big farmers’ interests? To the latter he represents a government that does not have their interests at heart, yet they do not seem to hold this against him on a personal level. Where his social background and outlook are concerned, he shows that he is closer to the landowners than to the labourers. They tacitly appeal to him for approval, and he indicates cautious agreement with some of their rhetorical judgements by gestures of the hand or head. What, for instance, is the use of ordering the farmers to keep records of the labour they employ? Inquisitively, I ask one of them to fetch me his labourers’ wage slips. He hesitates, but finally gives in. The daily wage shown is invariably four rupees, for half-a-day's work according to his own notes in the margin. He is legally covered to the extent that he has obtained his labourers’ thumbprints, but only the first pages of the book have been filled in, and the last entry is many months old. He has ‘forgotten’ to keep his administration up-to-date, he says with a challenging look in the

direction of the GLO, who pretends not to have heard. Why should he spoil the atmosphere with formalistic objections? A fresh round of tea is brought in, and gradually the conversation moves on to other, less sensitive topics. There is no mention of any kind of infringement as we leave. We shall be most welcome to come again, and the next time we must stay for a meal, and even stay the night if we can. The guest is king here, after all. Our road out of the village runs alongside the hutment colonies of the landless, but this time we take no notice of them. Some of the labourers watch us from the door openings of their ramshackle huts, in silence. They know where we have been.

The Due Course of Law What happens next? In theory, matters take the following course. The farmers suspected of infringing the law on minimum wages are summoned to the GLO's office. Even in the cases where this point is reached, no further action is taken . Largely due to the arbitrary way in which statements are drawn up, these often remain incomplete or incorrect. In theory, it would be quite easy for an employer to dispute the legal validity of the complaint against him. Objections of this kind are, nevertheless, rarely heard, since it is always possible for the GLO to adjust the original statement. The farmer has to prove, by means of wage slips and a daily register of the labourers employed, that he has paid the minimum wage. If he is unable to produce these proofs, he is given the chance to reach an amicable settlement. When the inspector has listened to both sides, he determines the arrears of wages due to the labourers over the foregoing period, for a maximum of six months, assuming a working month of twenty days. But when the farmer promises to pay the minimum wage in future and to keep a daily record as well, he is allowed to go scot-free. However, if the employer continues to deny that he had broken the law, or if he refuses to abide by the settlement reached, the GLO can file a suit, at all events where the labourer has not withdrawn his original statement in the meantime. The case now goes before the local court, which determines the sum that the farmer must pay the labourer. This includes a fine, which can amount to ten times the arrears of wages. As we can see from Table 13.1 , only in very exceptional cases does the GLO actually resort to prosecution, and of the cases actually brought against farmers, only a few

reach the stage of a formal charge, and even then they seldom result in a penalty. In other words, the employer caught breaking the law runs little risk of having a legal case brought against him. There is even less chance that a labourer would have the opportunity of registering a complaint against the farmer. A total of 12,000 to 15,000 inspections a year (see Table 13.1 ) means that scarcely more than 4 per cent of the agricultural labour force in the district is approached by a GLO for the required information. Yet what can one official do in a taluka with 20-30,000 agricultural labourers, sometimes even more than that? Nevertheless, the plea that more staff would be needed for enforcing compliance with the minimum wage laws simply does not hold water. It is not only the (assistant) GLOs who are officially authorized to inspect and prosecute. On the strength of a special clause in the law, various other officials in the district administration can also act as labour inspectors. These are the deputy collectors, deputy district development officers, mamlatdars, taluka development officers, and soil conservation officers. To my knowledge, these bureaucrats seldom (if at all) exercise their right as law enforcement officers. The figures shown in Table 13.1 imply that out of every 10,000 agricultural labourers in South Gujarat, scarcely 250 are contacted each year. Only in ten cases out of this number is there a decision to prosecute, and of these no more than a single case is finally brought before the local court. There is a good chance that even this will end without a verdict being brought or sentence being passed. To the picture that has thus far emerged, we must add that only a handful of employers comply voluntarily with the law on minimum wages. Underpayment is a universal phenomenon. Judging by my own data, the loss of wages per agricultural labourer per day averages two-and-a-half rupees, even allowing for extras in kind, and the partial or total failure to repay money advanced. If one estimates the average number of working days in the agrarian year at 200, the labourers receive approximately Rs 500 a year less than the sum prescribed by the government. According to my calculations, the landowning elite withhold Rs 15 crore [one crore equals ten million] a year from the landless class in the form of an extralegal surplus. We would do well to bear in mind that although this sum is only a fraction of the bigger landowners’ costs and ultimate profits, it constitutes a very substantial proportion of the labourers’ total earnings. I would estimate that it amounts to between a quarter and a third of their annual income, a

sum that makes the difference between the life of extreme poverty which for very many of the landless is something to strive towards, and their actual, utterly pauperized existence. Table 13.1: Action Undertaken in 1983 and 1984 Under Minimum Wage Legislation for Agricultural Labour in Surat District *

In view of this background, it is hardly surprising to learn that the agricultural labourers benefit very little from the help the Government of Gujarat claims to provide so generously and determinedly. When questioned they answer candidly, although not with the intention of registering complaints against their employers. Experience has taught them that the chances of actually receiving the compensation awarded them are extremely slim. Furthermore, even if it were to reach them, it would count for little against the certainty of never again being offered work. Not only would the farmer sack the labourer concerned, but he would also not hesitate to turn the other landowners against him. There is no question of a right to work . However low wages may be, what is even worse for the landless than underpayment is that they be regarded as troublesome and unreliable, and therefore no longer considered for regular employment. Although no one talks about it, the employers do maintain a blacklist. Anyone finding his way onto that list would do better to disappear from the village altogether, or at all events to look quite far afield for employment outside agriculture. Time and again, GLOs assured me that fear of this kind of vengeance was the main reason why so few labourers are prepared to stick to their initial statements made in brief and surprise encounters. Only a

few of them will continue to maintain that they are underpaid when confronted by their employers. Without a complaint of this nature, there is no chance of a prosecution. Most agricultural labourers have the courage to talk openly in the safety of their own localities, beyond the reach of the farmers’ eyes and ears. Their account is always the same, as we are able to confirm later that day, while visiting yet another village. Serious underpayment, little work to be had, and this is diminished still further by migrants who are content to take even less wages. Maidservants in farmers’ households constitute a separate category of workers. For several hours work each morning—cleaning vessels, washing clothes, sweeping the house, cleaning out the byre and so on—they are paid only five to fifteen rupees a month in addition to a daily meal, which they usually take home. The farmer's wife, who gives orders to these maidservants, is often even more of a tyrant and skinflint than the husband. For the first time we came to know about labourers who have already encountered GLOs. Their experiences have been anything but encouraging. An old man tells how, about a year earlier, someone stopped him on the road to ask the same questions we are now putting to him. His questioner had told him that he would hear more about it. Did our visit have anything to do with it, and would someone else turn up next year too? Loud laughter from the bystanders. It is a barely veiled insinuation that all this nosiness never produces any results—not for the victims at any rate. Made bolder by this candidness, another labourer tells us how an official had taken his son's thumbprint. The boy herded cattle for two rupees a day. The farmer did not hold it against the son, but did charge him (the father) the sixty rupees that had to be paid to the official ‘to close the file’. Besides having his outstanding debt increased by this sum, he was also warned not to give information to strangers in future. He had learned his lesson. Although many nod their heads in agreement, only a few prefer to remain silent. A labourer steps forward from the circle that has formed around us, complaining that he is being boycotted by the farmers. The master for whom he has been working for many years gave him to understand a month earlier that he had to repay his debt of Rs 500. But he has never had such a sum in his life, so how could he consent to a deduction of one or two rupees from his daily wage of only six rupees? It is absolutely impossible to survive on even less than that. He never went back after that incident, but

since then all the other farmers have refused him work. Out of necessity, he is now going to a neighbouring village to hire himself out as a day labourer, but can nothing be done about what has happened to him? Perhaps influenced by the open criticism that he has just heard, the GLO spontaneously suggests seeking out the farmer in question and finding a solution to the dispute on the spot. This will also give me the chance to see arbitration in action. The three of us get on the motorcycle, the labourer between us. Everything about him shows that he has little confidence in the undertaking once we are on our way. Arriving at the landowner's bungalow, he hides himself behind a parked tractor. He nearly creeps away altogether when urged to come inside the house with us and take a seat on the sofa in the front room. In fact, he is not really expected to accept the invitation. It would be quite unthinkable for a labourer to enter the house in the company of people who are socially far superior to him. The GLO shrugs when I say that it might have been better to fetch the master to the servant, instead of the other way around. He would never think of such a thing of his own accord, and he does not want to hear of it from me. Our appearance on the scene attracts a good deal of attention. The landowner is not there but his wife says that he could be home at any moment. She takes the GLO aside to ask him what is going on, and he tells her in a whisper. The neighbours, who are quick to make their appearance, also join in. They discuss the matter among themselves—the identity of the labourer involved in this business, and the pack of lies he has been telling us. His debt has reached Rs 500 because he asked so often for the loan of small sums in the past few years. Isn't it true that the farmers have to pay back the money they borrow from the bank? Instead of being grateful to his master for giving him so much credit, something most landowners have been unwilling to do for a long time now precisely because they are afraid of bad debts, here we have a labourer who is insolent enough to complain when reminded of his obligations. The line of argument has now been decided, and the former farm servant is called inside to listen to it. Although he is only one against eight or nine farmers, he defends himself staunchly. The ensuing dialogue makes it clear that a good deal of the money at the centre of the dispute was lent to him for medical treatment. The year before, he had become ill after spraying the standing crops with deva (‘medicine’, i.e., a pesticide). The expenditure for

treatment, some 200 rupees, had been paid by his boss but only as a loan , as he found out much later. In view of the nature of his illness and its cause, he refused to accept this as a debt. After all, had he not sustained much greater damage than the farmer, since he received no wages in the weeks he was unfit for work? At this point, the GLO abruptly cuts the conversation short. He has just heard that the master of the house is in fact at a meeting, in his capacity as board member of one of the large cooperative sugar factories in the region. Suddenly, he sees no further need to await his return or to continue this claim-and-counterclaim session. Even the suggestion that someone of this calibre might be guilty of labour malpractices cannot be entertained for a moment, and would certainly not be a wise course of action. Haven't I seen with my own eyes how difficult it is to obtain evidence one way or the other? In no time we are standing outside again. The GLO curtly dismisses the labourer he has dragged here virtually by the scruff of his neck. The man has to find his own way back in the dark, accompanied by some of his neighbours, who have been waiting for him. They ran behind us to the farmer's house, not unjustifiably suspicious that we would be unable or unwilling to protect their comrade in the confrontation awaiting him.

Official Mediation The next day at an informal meeting at the headquarters we talk over these matters again. The official in question says that he is dependent upon the labourers’ cooperation, something they are only willing to give where conflict is acute and has come into the open. And then one has to ask one's self whether the information they give is reliable. Don't the landless tend to exaggerate, on the other hand? His chief backs him up with the remark that there is great resistance to labour inspection. He leaves no room for doubt that this has a great deal to do with the attitude taken by the rural elite. If his staff were to keep to the letter of the law, they would no longer be able to go into the villages. The dominant landowners would use violence to drive them out, if need be. Statements of this kind throw the vulnerable position of the landless into glaring relief, and, in fact, the prevailing social climate is used in this way to excuse the ineffectiveness of government control. It explains the indulgent way in which GLOs turn a blind eye towards farmers’

infringements of the law, such as failure to fill in pay slips or failure to keep a daily register of the labourers employed. For the same reason, the inspectors are reluctant to press farmers to repay arrears of wages. The officials call this the room for manoeuvre necessary for persuading the employers to make concessions. What I would like to emphasize is that these officials are not implementing the law , only interpreting it. Although this agency has a mandate to enforce observance of the rights of the weakest party, they refuse to give the agricultural workers their due, unconditionally and systematically. Actually, the GLOs claim to be impartial and to play a mediatory role between the two parties. It is arbitration that is considered important, rather than advancing the interests of those who are their real clients. The issue at stake is that this office, set up to provide a counterweight to the economic and extra-economic pressures exerted by the dominant farmers, in fact very often confirms the great and increasing inequality between landowners and landless, through its mode of operation. While, institutionally speaking, an impartial stance has been adopted, the social backgrounds of the officers to whom the task of law enforcement has been entrusted inevitably tilts them further in the employers’ direction. At one of the discussions at headquarters, I ask an official for his personal views. It is no mere slip of the tongue when he begins saying ‘We farmers…’. Besides working for the government, he also farms his own land in the area for which he is responsible . He is speaking from his own experience, but most of his colleagues as well, when expressing their opinions freely, have a great deal of understanding and sympathy for the landowners’ viewpoint. They have little insight into the landless labourers’ existence, even though in their official capacity it is their main task to show concern for this. These bureaucrats may formulate their views in a more refined way than the average farmer, but they have the same preconceived ideas about the utter worthlessness of most agricultural workers. Does this class affinity mean that officials really behave as the landowners’ allies, intent on causing them as little trouble as possible? To listen to the farmers, one would hardly think so. On the contrary, they are fiercely opposed to ‘state interference’, and subject visiting GLOs to a stream of criticism and reproach. Government intervention in labour relations is based on the premise that the rural order consists of two parties, employers and employees, each with justifiable aspirations or even

demands that have to be reconciled as far as possible, with the help of official mediation. However much distortion in favour of farmers there may be in practice, the terms of arbitration are based on the principle, first, that there is more than one interested party, and second, that an external authority is competent to settle the differences between the parties. The latter notion in particular irritates the landowners a great deal. In fact, they will not tolerate the idea that the landless, whom they have dominated for many generations, can call upon the government for support . The fact that little ever comes of this in practice does little to diminish the landowners’ displeasure. The attitude adopted by the labour inspectors is one of understanding for the landowners’ complaints, but at the same time making it clear that, as officials, they have to satisfy their superiors where both inspections and prosecutions of defaulters are concerned. They hint, however, that something can be done about the latter. Farmers who are called to account on a labourers’ statement can buy their way out of trouble. What this really means is that inspectors can use the discretion with which they are officially vested to make money. Rather than being anti-labourer or pro-farmer, they act largely in their self-interest . It is one of the many examples of privatization of public function. The proceeds of this conversion are often greater than the formal salary. This is also the reason why quite a high sum has to be paid for appointments to a post offering prospects of generous ‘earnings’ on the side. The market mechanism is not limited only to the sphere known as free enterprise, but extends to the state apparatus. There are more inspections made by GLOs than are found in statistics, and more questionnaires are filled in than are included in the monthly report. For the officials in charge, a proportion of these constitute the working capital for their own extra-public operations. Obviously, I have not been able to follow close at hand the negotiations with employers (with a few exceptions), but several of my informants among the landowners have talked very frankly about the price they have had to pay to save themselves from prosecution. Such practices as these reinforce the farmers’ negative image of the state bureaucracy. It reinforces their dislike of a useless government that battens on their pockets. Yet, in the ultimate analysis, it is the landless who are the real victims, since the bribe is always less than the wages withheld from the latter. Even the labourers know quite well that the statements they make are

often used for the purpose of extorting a bribe . Some of them were able to tell me exactly how much their employers had paid in hush money, sometimes only an hour or two after they had been obliged to set their thumbprints on paper. It is one more reason why labourers, when approached by GLOs, are not very forthcoming with information. We have associated the official inability to offer adequate protection to the rural proletariat, with the powerful position of the large landowner class on one hand, and with the failure of the agency entrusted with providing that protection on the other. The fact that wages lag far behind the legally prescribed minimum results from the huge supply of available labour, partly from the region itself, but supplemented by migrant workers. The farmers’ dominance, in a non-economic sense as well, adds yet another dimension to the problem of the agricultural labourers, the essence of which is that there are simply too many of them. They have no bargaining power whatsoever . Under these circumstances, so the excuse always runs, a government can do little more than establish a norm by fixing a price for labour, in the hope that this will be accepted as quickly and completely as possible. The question of why so little ever comes of it can be disposed of by pointing to class bias and bureaucratic corruption. Yet, in my view, resistance by dominant forces in society combined with official misconduct fall somewhat short of providing a complete explanation for the ineffectiveness of government action. One must also analyse the broader economic and social context of which policies for the protection of labour form a part. There can be no doubt whatsoever that a strategy for capitalist development is being followed and promoted in Gujarat. Slogans and advertisements aimed at enticing entrepreneurs and capital to the state enlarge at length upon ‘the favourable labour climate’. Formulated in a more straightforward way, this means low wages and lack of labour unrest , an attractive combination for employers from Mumbai (Bombay), for example. The point I want to make is that a policy in which labour is systematically subordinated to capital allows little room for manoeuvre to an official agency commissioned to compensate the agricultural workers in some measure for their acknowledged inferiority. This handicap can never be overcome even if officials were prepared to range themselves solidly behind (or better, in front of) their clients, rather than being inclined to use the law to fill their own pockets. Such an agency is, like other branches of the government bureaucracy, part of a state order that shows little real

concern for the conditions of the rural proletariat. When the minimum wage was raised on an earlier occasion, a minister who came under fire from an audience of landowners while visiting a village in Surat district, told them plainly that some laws were never meant to be implemented. At the very moment he was making this statement in one part of the village, agricultural labourers in another part who seized the opportunity of the bigwig's visit to press for the payment of the new rate, were beaten up by farmers’ sons for their insolence. The resulting police case was shelved and nothing more heard of it. In the light of such remarks and incidents involving leading politicians, it would seem sensible to tone down strictures on the culpability of government labour officers. There is another example from which one could conclude that failure to protect the most vulnerable in rural society is connected with forces at work in the political arena. This is the refusal to apply the minimum wage law to the army of sugarcane cutters, who each year are brought in from far away by the cooperative sugar factories in South Gujarat to work throughout the campaign. Once the government came to know of the conditions under which they were working, it was no longer possible to remain aloof from the problem. 4 Here was a clear case of across-the-board infringements of formal regulations. The cooperative factories belonging to the bigger landowners were guilty of underpaying harvest workers on a truly massive scale: they did not abide by the regulations governing the use of contract labour; and they ignored legal restrictions on interstate labour migration. For the sake of brevity, I shall only take up the first point. Several seasons ago, a committee in which the government was also represented fixed the harvesting rate at eighteen rupees a tonne. Since this is the exact amount that a work team (koyta) , supposedly consisting of a man and his wife or any other pair, is presumed to be able to cut in one day, the committee's obvious objective was to raise wages to the legal minimum. This decision was acclaimed as a considerable improvement, right up to the highest bureaucratic and political echelons. Yet this is a serious misrepresentation of the situation. First, most harvesting teams consist not of two workers but of two-and-a-half to three, that is, a man and wife and a child aged between ten and fifteen years, who has to work along with the adults. Second, a work team usually cuts only two-thirds to three-quarters of a tonne in a day. Thus, earnings for an extremely heavy workload, often requiring a return to the fields in the night hours in order not to interrupt the flow of sugarcane to the

factory, remain far below the officially prescribed rate. The policy makers’ ignorance of these practices is no excuse. As I have been able to confirm, they are perfectly well aware of what is going on, but they shut their eyes in order to maintain the fiction of compliance with the legal regulations. Yet where these agro-industries are concerned, it would be quite easy to implement the labour laws. We are dealing here with a large-scale, welladministered, and extremely profitable sector of the rural economy. There are none of the organizational difficulties that beset GLOs when they are inspecting the thousands of separate farms that employ agricultural labourers in limited numbers and often on an irregular basis. Nevertheless, governmental control in what can be called the formal sector of the rural economy appears to be essentially just as ineffective. The cause lies not in the system of labour inspection, but, as the official in charge confided to me, in the institutional inability of the agency to resist the political pressures from the strong sugar producers’ lobby in the state. The bigger landowners realize that they form a class in themselves, and have united into a powerful farmers’ alliance based on that consciousness. In the past, this Khedut Semaj gave particular support to the political opposition, but its dominance is also acknowledged by the ruling Congress party. Yet it would be wrong to see the public stand taken by the alliance simply as an extension of those of the established political parties. Right from the time the Khedut Semaj was set up at the end of the 1950s, it has taken a strongly anti-state line, to which a new impulse has been given by an agrarian producers’ movement that has recently been spreading very rapidly from Maharashtra over the whole of western India. 5 In contrast to this mobilization among the rural bourgeoisie, the landless are still hardly aware of their class identity. Soon after Independence, an organization was set up under the direction of Gandhian social workers for the uplift of the particular tribal caste in South Gujarat to which the vast majority of agricultural labourers in the central plain belong. Imbued with Gandhian ideology, this Halpati Seva Sangh (HSS) has focused particularly on welfare and educational activities. The efforts of the staff, mainly members of higher castes, have been directed towards training their clients to be better Hindus. Hardly any economic demands are made on behalf of the landless, and, consequently, agricultural labourers were passed over when land reforms were implemented in the region between 1950 and 1970. In the ensuing years, the HSS has mounted no campaign for better wages on

behalf of its clientele. Whenever labourers have engaged in local action on their own initiative, calling a strike, for instance, the farmers have quite frequently enlisted the aid of Gandhian social workers in ending the agitation. My sketch of the HSS in an earlier publication (Breman 1974) is still valid, but in the meanwhile the main leader, who himself comes from the class of dominant landowners, has completely lost his hold over the members of this caste of landless. There are still a number of government subsidized activities, but these are very routine in nature and have hardly any impact. Besides the HSS, an urban politician in Surat has in recent years set himself up as the agricultural labourers’ champion. Rather than operating from within a regular organization, he holds regular meetings that constitute a barometer of his popularity. He is notorious as an outright opportunist who frequently changes political sides and who is on the lookout for a vote bank for which he can act as a broker in the political arena, mainly with the intention of furthering his own interests. The aim of the above discussion has been to emphasize the fact that the landless labourers among the working population of rural South Gujarat, forming the largest class, still lead an extremely fragmented existence in social and political terms. The immediate result is the absence of a counterbalance to the landowners’ dominant position. In the implementation of agrarian policy, the agricultural labourers’ interests— employment opportunities, earnings, access to public facilities—carry no weight. Their presence in large numbers is even defined as being counterproductive for society at large. To the extent that the labourers have anything at all to do with government, they come in contact mostly with the officials and agencies charged with keeping this class under control (for instance, through family planning) or even with ‘conditioning’ them in the negative sense. Police behaviour is a telling example of the latter. Finally, since the labourers lack their own organizations (specially trade unions), state personnel at local level are under no pressure to apply official rulings in an impartial way, and to give the labourers even their minimum legal rights.

The Government in Action

It is quite openly acknowledged at higher state levels that good intentions, even when converted into concrete measures, have no effect because the proletariat totally lacks the ability to defend itself . The formal reasoning is that official intervention can achieve little as long as landowners continue to evade regulations and the landless are unwilling to complain about it. In 1982, the government in Gujarat set up the Gram Majur Kalyan Kendra (Rural Workers’ Welfare Centre) in an attempt to create a counterweight. There was a double aim in this: first, the creation of a local platform for all kinds of special social–economic programmes and facilities for agricultural labourers; second, to motivate this target group to make use of whatever was offered to them from above. Briefly, the train of thought behind this objective is as follows. The amorphous mass of landless live in a state of apathy. The misery of their existence derives from their ignorance, and, more particularly, from their unfamiliarity with protective and corrective government measures. The absence of social consciousness prevents them from uniting to find their strength in mutual cooperation. I shall come back to this definition of the problem in terms of a culture of poverty in the final paragraph. First, I want to discuss the impact of the action centres set up for them. Has this experiment been successful? The new approach is still in the trial stage, currently extending no further than one village in every taluka with at least 10,000 agricultural labourers. Thus, the programme reaches only a fraction of the households qualifying for it. The rural labour commissioner has been given the responsibility of organizing and supervising the programme. While travelling around the South Gujarat plain with officials from this agency, I had the opportunity of visiting one of these centres, quite close to Bardoli. It is already late in the afternoon when we reach the village. The place in which the centre is housed is locked up, but a startled office boy (peon) opens it up for us. The rural organizer who had been assumed would be sitting in the centre, had to be fetched from his home. He has been selected for this post from among a large number of candidates, all unemployed youths with schooling, and owes his appointment to the fact that he belongs to an untouchable caste, which gives him a head start in obtaining a government job. He is considered to belong to the actual target group and receives only a nominal sum for his efforts, yet the monthly Rs 400 he earns is far higher than the agricultural labourers’ wages, whether actual or

theoretical. Supposedly one of them, someone who acts as their spokesman and champion in the outside world, he behaves in fact as a government agent , the lowest in the hierarchy of officials whose task it is to maintain contact with the landless. The rural organizer is assisted by a child minder (ayah) earning Rs 100 a month, and an office boy who is paid Rs 50 a month. Only the last comes from among the landless labourers. What are the duties of the rural organizer? Not many; in fact, so few that one can hardly talk of a regular daily work routine. He is somewhat nonplussed at my question about the work he actually does. ‘The organizing of sports and games for labourers in the village’, say the instructions, which we all read together. Even his boss, the official accompanying me, jokes about this. No, very little comes of this, it is true. Stacked in his office, there are a few cooking pots and pans and other kitchen necessities, which poor households in the village may borrow when there is a wedding feast to prepare, for instance. There are also a few musical instruments for the religious song gatherings called kirtans . The equipment is covered with a thick layer of dust, suggesting that it is used infrequently. In contrast, there is no sign of the reading materials with which the centres are provided to help labourers to keep up-to-date with what is going on in the wider society outside the village. In view of the high incidence of illiteracy, newspapers and magazines would in any case only be accessible to a handful of the labourers. Neither is there any adult education: the evening classes mentioned in the programme of activities are not in fact held, due to lack of interest, the rural organizer tells us. From the records he keeps, it appears that between forty and fifty toddlers come to the centre every day, where they are kept amused for a few hours and are given a meal by the ayah . This ostensibly costs Rs 500 a month. If it is prepared at all in the quantities suggested by this sum of money, the food certainly does not reach so many children. There is nothing to show that the building serves as a social meeting place for women or youths. This disposes of leadership training and promotion of communal feelings. A handful of the landless in the village have been given loans to enable them to find livings outside agriculture. In 1983, members of twenty-two households received an average sum of Rs 1,000—part loan, part subsidy— with which to buy carpenter's or mason's tools, fishnets, a sewing machine, axes and saws for wood cutting, a buffalo or goat, a handcart or bicycle for hawking vegetables, or to stock up a roadside stall, and so on. When I came

back to this village a few weeks later (and this time on my own), I tried to verify the use made of these loans. In only a few cases was I able to track down the tools or other means of production that had been purchased with loan money. Even then, the recipients quoted markedly lower figures for the sums received than were recorded in the rural organizer's account books. At the time of my research in Gujarat, the state government mounted a publicity campaign drawing attention to the progress the state had made in the agrarian sector, including the introduction of life insurance for agricultural labourers, in mid-1983. For a premium of Rs 5 a year, agricultural labourers’ relatives are entitled to Rs 2,000 in the case of a fatal accident, and Rs 1,000 where the labourer had died from natural causes. The actual premium is Rs 10 a year, the government making up the deficiency. The proud advertisement suggests that this group insurance scheme is unique and is being promoted in a big way. 6 The reality in Surat district, where the scheme was first introduced, tells us something different. In the centre I am visiting, the number who have taken out insurance under this scheme over the previous year has remained confined to scarcely 300 labourers spread over six villages. This represents only a tiny fraction of the total landless population, and even then they have often only joined the scheme because a sympathetic farmer has been good enough to pay the premium for his farm servants. Few of the rural poor are able to set aside as much as Rs 5 for this purpose. Finally, I have never found anyone receiving the monthly payment that, according to a new regulation, can be claimed by the aged and by those labourers declared physically unfit for work. In the first report on the action centres, it is admitted that till now the work has been mainly devoted to welfare, with the aim of developing social consciousness, and that there have been few tangible results to date. 7 The intention is to shift the emphasis gradually to objectives of a more economic kind, and at the same time to make a start with more socially sensitive tasks. The rural organizers are supposed to play a crucial role in this, uncovering and rectifying abuses in the treatment of rural labour. They will be expected to inform both landowners and labourers about the law on the minimum wage; persuade farmers who continue to underpay their workers that they should fall in line; show concern for migrant labourers and prevent them from being exploited; finally, summon any employers using sanctions against labourers to break their resistance.

With all this at the back of my mind, I ask the rural organizer in the centre how much labourers in this village earn in a day. ‘Nine rupees’, he answers without a blush, and continues to maintain this even when I express doubt. Given his role of local government representative, what else can he say? He is only prepared to amend this figure, cautiously, when his boss intervenes to make it clear that we know better, after talking with labourers of various neighbourhoods in this village. After much hesitation, he gives the figure of seven rupees. After a further exchange in which we establish that even this sum is much too high, he leaves it to us to find out the extent of underpayment. What good does it do to bring all this into the open? He cannot tell us even approximately how many landless labourers’ huts there are in the village, where the migrants are staying, how much they earn, and so on. The organizer ought to identify himself strongly with his clientele— this, at least, is the underlying assumption of the programme—but he quite clearly feels himself to be a cut above them, because of his middle-school education (twelfth standard failed). It is absolutely naive to think that this young man would want to, or dare to, teach the farmers their legal obligations, perhaps hauling them over the coals and ultimately making complaints about them to the authorities. I would not count on the likelihood of a contest with the landowners initiated by the government. Official publications talk of training for responsible leadership and only permit social action regarded as ‘constructive’. It seems to me that a far more important function of the action centres is to keep the growing tension in the countryside within bounds and to provide politicians with a platform that will facilitate communication with the landless, who constitute a sizeable vote bank, without conflicting with the first objective. The centres serve as checkpoints for the allocation of all kinds of benefits and facilities (including loans and subsidies, regular jobs, materials for building huts, admission to educational or vocational training institutions) to a small vanguard among the landless who have some influence in their own neighbourhoods. It is possible to recruit an even bigger following through these rank-and-file leaders, who naturally also profit to a disproportionate extent from whatever comes up for distribution. Government programmes such as the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) and the Tribal Sub-Plan provide the financial means for this type of public expenditure. Are these ‘loan melas (fairs)’ the enormous waste of money that some studies seem to suggest? The donations are enough to secure

political allegiance, even if they fall short of bringing about genuine structural change . This, in any case, is not the ultimate objective. There is a knack to acquiring ever more new sinecures with which to mobilize and consolidate political support, specially at election time. Thus there will soon be a further rise in the minimum wage for agricultural labour, if only because statistics produced by government agencies show that nine rupees are no longer enough to fulfil basic needs because of the continuous rise in prices. Naturally, the introduction of the new rate does not mean that it will be put into practice. 8 Policy on landless labourers can be summed up as one of accommodation, but does this strategy work? And, if so, for how much longer can it succeed?

Acute Confrontation There has been a sharp increase in rural labour unrest in recent years, not excluding violent conflicts. There was a clash between landowners and landless in this village shortly before the Rural Workers’ Welfare Centre was opened. When the landowners ignored the labourers’ protests at the preferential treatment shown to the migrants who settled here in large numbers, small ‘incidents’ escalated into a full-scale fight. I have not been able to uncover exactly what had happened in this case, but the mood on both sides is one of undiminished aggressiveness. What has struck me forcibly is not so much the farmers’ intense enmity towards the labourers (I have become accustomed to this), but the labourers’ strikingly militant attitude. These outbursts are spontaneous, highly localized, and of short duration, but their increasing number and seriousness is indicative of an acute intensification of rural class antagonisms. To gain a better insight into this escalation, I paid as many visits as possible to villages in the plains where conflicts of this kind were taking place or where they had occurred some time before. The way the government intervened in order to defuse tensions provided a recurring focus of attention in the course of my fieldwork. Accompanied by a GLO, I spend an afternoon in a village where a longstanding quarrel had ended in a bloody collision a few days after New Year (1985). The village centre where the farmers live is rather deserted. Many of the houses are shut up, and our reception by the remaining residents is

lukewarm. They have little reason to be well-disposed towards the GLO, since the official sent to the village as soon as news of the conflict became known, served a summons on thirty-three farmers for their failure to comply with the minimum wage law. With this charge hanging over them, few of the landowners see any point in talking to us. The telling of their story, little by little, does nothing to lift the mood of depression. Nine farmers are in hospital, five are in prison. Among them is the son of one of the men with whom we are talking, arrested on suspicion of having used a firearm. The cause of all this was a disagreement starting more than a year ago with the labourers who keep buffaloes. All of them landless, they depend on the village waste for grazing their cattle. They also took them into the farmers’ fields without asking the owners’ permission, and they were even stealing their crops. The farmers’ response was a collective contract made with six field guards (zim rakha) , strongmen who have come to the village to safeguard their property. These tactics seem to have been very effective, but the labourers, angry at once again having received the wrong end of the stick, went on strike. They would have nothing more to do with the local landowners, and set out each day to look for work in neighbouring villages. This was a nuisance for the farmers but no insurmountable problem, because a sufficient number of labourers from outside came to the village once they heard about the dispute. The new equilibrium had been disturbed several months ago, when the outside labourers stayed away after being threatened by the local landless. The farmers reacted by intensifying surveillance of their fields and crops so that it became increasingly difficult for the landless to find enough forage for their cattle. Tensions rose still further towards the end of the year, when the current village head, a member of the landless caste, was defeated in the local elections by farmers’ candidate. In order to win, the latter had struck a deal with the village's Harijan households, the price being favours and benefits for these small or marginal landowners. The price was not too great for the bigger farmers from the dominant caste. They felt it was high time that the landless—definitely in the majority, with 200 households— were pushed back into the lowly position they had always occupied. Exactly two weeks earlier, the bomb had exploded. In the evening, the field guards apprehended several landless-caste youth in possession of stolen goods. There was a free-for-all, and farmers who joined in were barely able to prevent the battle from shifting to their part of the village.

Fierce blows were exchanged, and although it was some comfort to the farmers that there were higher casualties among their opponents, they were nevertheless shocked that the landless had dared to fight them at all. The labourers even came perilously close to entering the farmers’ streets. Rather than keeping this rabble on a tight rein, the government seems to be looking for a compromise, which will be binding on the employers as well. The farmers are very angry about this, and their wrath is vented on my companion. The politicians, even more than the officials, are being made to suffer. Previously, the landowners were allowed to manage their own affairs and there were peaceful labour relations in the village. In a milieu like this, one always hears the complaint that politicians are stirring the agricultural labourers up against the farmers. Jinabhai Darji, who belongs to South Gujarat where he has a large following among the rural poor, is the biggest villain of all in the farmers’ eyes. He is reported to have said in a meeting held in the labourers’ colony during the national election campaign a few months earlier, that he would be overjoyed at the death of five members of the dominant caste in every village. The GLO does nothing to contradict this kind of insinuation and maintains a meaningful silence whenever the charges become more heated and extreme. But casual remarks make it clear that he agrees with the general opinion that politicians create incidents of this sort and do nothing to solve them. But his attitude of detachment does not convince all those present. From a distance, our conversation is frequently interrupted by a landowner who has refused to join us. Sitting in front of his house across the street, he makes the sarcastic comment, ‘Don't bother to talk with these guys; they twist everything we say and then use the information against us.’ The atmosphere remains strained. After a while, the GLO has said everything he wants to say, and asks if there is a TV set. The England versus India test match is on, and he wants to catch up on it. The only man present who has a set at home is not in the mood for a social visit. He has not watched the TV himself for the past few weeks. How could he do so when his neighbours are in hospital or prison? The official has the stronger will, though, and soon we are comfortably installed in front of the TV screen. After a short while, I suggest that it might do no harm to go to the hutment colonies and talk with the labourers as well. At this, the farmers and my companion all look askance at me. We have already heard and discussed what happened, haven't we? But when I insist, the GLO opts to go with me. Better that than letting me out of his

sight in a place where anything might happen, and in fact has happened. As soon as we enter the part of the village where the landless reside, we are stopped by a member of the Reserve State Police from the contingent camping here since the disturbances. Five of them are housed in a hut, out of which the occupants had to move to make room for them, and five more are in another labourers’ colony. No, they have not been quartered on the farmers. Their orders are to keep an eye on everything the landless do. These have kept in the background since our arrival, although they are not intimidated by our presence. When we want to make contact with them, they listen to us, not afraid, but certainly in a tense and defensive mood. Their version of recent events differs significantly from what we have heard from the farmers. A couple of youths on their way home on that evening had been beaten up by the field guards for absolutely no good reason. These landowners’ mercenaries who had waylaid them sheered off when other labourers living nearby hurried to their rescue, but the next evening they returned with a large number of farmers who had even driven their tractors to other villages to call up reinforcements. Over a hundred men had begun lashing out at the landless with sticks and sickles and knives, making no distinction between young and old, men, women or children, and had wreaked a great deal of havoc in the landless’ quarter. Some of the farmers’ sons had even used firearms. A dozen of the landless were wounded, some of them seriously, and the next day the police had arrested a few of them. Apparently, you are not even allowed to defend yourselves any more. An elderly woman shows us a huge wound on her upper leg, inflicted with a farming implement. One of her sons had both arms ripped open and is lying at home now, swathed in bandages up to his armpits. Her second son was taken away by the police, and there is no one left in her house to provide for the family. We walk past huts with their doors kicked in or with their roofs torn apart. Nevertheless, the attackers have not been completely blind in their destructiveness, since the homes most heavily hit are those belonging to the recognized leaders among the landless labourers. Little remains of the former village headman's hut, which you can see right through. I ask him if any of his possessions are missing. No, he answers, but then there was nothing to steal in the first place. We hear a different story about the background to the conflict, as well. The labourers insist that they graze their cattle only on communal ground,

which is, after all, open to everyone. They cut grass for fodder only along the public road and further point out that, over the years, the village waste has steadily decreased in size. The farmers appropriated some of this area when the coming of canal irrigation made it profitable to level off fallow lands and prepare them for tilling. The labourers say it is not they but the landowners who are the thieves, in extending their property in such an underhand way. Where outside labourers are concerned, there was, of course, some resentment over these black-legs, but the local landless labourers piously deny that they have ever used threats to keep these busybodies out of the village. The field guards are the main source of grievance. These farmers’ mercenaries terrorize the labourers to the extent that women and children hardly dare set foot outside their own neighbourhood for fear of being raped, or at least molested. Incidents of this kind have become familiar here, just like elsewhere on the plains. In the past, local watchmen were chosen from the ranks of the landless, and were paid from the village funds. The farmers put an end to this custom several years ago, dismissing the old watchmen and appointing new men in their place, toughs from outside the area. Even in this, the dominant landowners make it clear that they prefer to deal with aliens. They refuse employment to the labourer households of the village, and also deny them access to alternative income opportunities. The landless admit that they lost the elections for the village panchayat; the farmers bought the votes of the Harijans and even of a minority among the labourers themselves. Yet, the Congress party's huge success in the national election in December 1984 boosted their morale. They were voting not so much for the majority party , as against the opposition supported by the farmers, who are very angry about the election results. That anger has undoubtedly contributed to the violent turn taken by the conflict. The GLO is intent on a compromise, and he tries to make room for this in our conversations with labourers, who do in fact listen to him when he advises them, in a paternal manner, not to force the issue. Their spokesmen say that they are prepared to resume work at the old rate of five-and-a-half rupees. It does not even enter their heads to demand the minimum wage . In the neighbouring villages to which they have scattered in search of work, they are only given five rupees, and by making this concession they hope to be able once again to collect firewood and cut grass for their buffaloes or goats, without retribution. Many of their animals have already fallen sick or

died from lack of fodder, and there is nothing else to do except give way. In the circumstances, the best solution would be a return to the old state of affairs, but there is one thing over which the labourers will not yield an inch —the zim rakha must leave the village. We carry this message back to the landowners’ quarter. The GLO is rather pessimistic, but thinks that something might be achieved by offering the farmers exemption from legal proceedings over their infringements of the minimum wage law. This concession, together with the labourers’ offer to return to work on the old conditions, might be attractive to the farmers, who indeed listen attentively. Yet, as soon as the matter of the zim rakha is raised, they become intransigent, branding the labourers as the aggressors. Surely, recent events have shown quite clearly that the farmers’ safety depends entirely on the presence of this private police force, commanding respect in a situation in which anything may happen at any moment. We leave the village without having effected a compromise. Several days later, there was a newspaper item about a deputation from the Khedut Semaj of Surat district to the home minister in Ahmedabad to lodge a complaint about recent incidents. The delegation includes farmers from villages in which there have recently been violent clashes. It is all the labourers’ fault, but the government does not escape lightly either. The trouble the farmers have been experiencing stems directly from the agricultural labourers’ purchase of cattle with government money, something that should never have been permitted, because people with no land of their own cannot afford to keep cattle. Out of sheer necessity, the farmers have had to bring in their own corps of security guards to stamp out the theft of grass, sugar cane and other crops from their fields. In villages where the landless have been slow to learn their lesson, there have been fights, sometimes with regrettable results. District authorities are lax in dealing appropriately with troublemakers, and instead of clamping down on those labourers who have been driving hard-working migrant workers out of the villages, officials have been putting pressure on farmers who do not bother to follow useless regulations. Priority must be given to protecting farmers’ property, because this also is in the state's interests, involving as it does the safeguarding of agrarian production. Further escalation of the situation can only be avoided by mounted police patrolling of the rural areas, so the argument goes. According to this type of information published in the local press, law and order themselves are hanging in the

balance Gujarat Samachar , Surat edition, 20 January 1985, 22 January 1985; Gujarat Mitr , 20 January 1985).

The Biased State Landowners in Surat district tend to take the law into their own hands, apparently no longer acknowledging the state's monopoly of violence. This is suggested both by the increasing number of firearms licences issued (although I did not succeed in obtaining more detailed information on this) and by the hiring of zim rakha to protect the dominant farmers from the demands and attacks of the maligned landless. Little is known about the background of these hired thugs; the only point upon which everyone is agreed is that they are Muslims, a derivation also suggested by the name of khanamia . According to some, they come from the border area between India and Pakistan, where they are usually occupied in smuggling and other illegal activities. The majority probably originates from Jam-busar taluka in Broach district, where they are regarded as descendants of gariasias (Rajputs) who converted to Islam in the 18th century. This information indicates a feudal warrior tradition now carried over into a capitalist context. The zim rakha are generally young men of above average height and sturdy build, whose material appearance is emphasized by the weapons they carry—cudgels, knives and occasionally firearms. Their leaders operate from urban bases in the region, where they have established a loose foothold. The farmers contract with them for the protection of their property, each village obtaining the services of up to six zim rakha for sums of Rs 30,000 to 50,000 a year, divided proportionately among the landowners. Part of the agreement is that the leader will, whenever necessary, increase the size of the group he has stationed in a village. Flexibility is a striking trait of these gangs’ organization. When workers from the main sugar factory in the central plain went on strike for a short time the preceding year, zim rakha from villages in the area were mobilized to come and break up the strike. Till now the law-enforcing authorities have been passive in the face of this competition from private quarters, arguing that no one can be forbidden to protect his own property. They prefer to turn a blind eye to infringements of the law accompanying this protection, or to treat them as unconnected incidents when they are actually brought to light. The official reticence should be understood against

the background of the links that exist between criminal elements and the aggressive behaviour of pressure groups in the political arena. The social and economic dynamics in rural areas create a breeding ground for the violence that has come to permeate political life. The fierce antagonism between landowners and landless labourers in Surat district offers abundant proof of this unwholesome trend, which also reflects the situation in many other parts of India. Over the past few decades, a class of dominant farmers has arisen owing its economic success to land reforms combined with agrarian modernization. Politically, these farmers behave as a strong lobby prepared to buy, with money and/or violence, the means necessary to strengthen their bargaining power. Although there is more publicity about the extralegal ‘black’ economy in urban areas, that of the countryside is just as extensive and active. It would be interesting to investigate whether the political forces underlying this illicit circuit are tending in the same direction as in the cities. The state does not remain aloof from the struggle between the top and bottom of the rural order. The bureaucrats, both at the district level and above, seem to acknowledge the hegemony of the bigger landowners over their immediate environment. The attempt to soften the misery of the landless labourers’ existence is the only governmental modification of this hegemony. To avoid the inevitable clash or prolonged class war that a changeover to a more equal and just society would imply that extra facilities and special privileges be granted, based on the assumption that the weaker party's gains are not necessarily the stronger party's loss. This strategy suggests that in a state of expansion, part of the gains can be set aside and apportioned to those segments of the rural population who have fallen behind in the development process. However, even this purely remedial policy arouses opposition because it lessens the beneficiaries’ dependence on their opponents. What one side calls the mitigation of deprivation is seen by the other as an attack on the existing social framework , or even as a downright conspiracy to create a new social order. Viewed in this light, we should understand the landowners’ exasperation over the loans made to landless labourers for the purchase of cattle, the allocation of land and provision of material for the construction of better huts, the institution of crafts training courses, giving access to off-farm employment, and similar measures. Yet these correctives are too marginal to bring about any real structural change; they remain

half-hearted attempts that get bogged down in corruption and inefficiency. Even the limited resources made available each year for this kind of programme are not exhausted because of apathy among the agencies involved, in combination with obstruction from vested interests. The officials in charge have an entirely different explanation for this failure to reach the target group, saying that the landless labourers turn down the opportunity for self-improvement when it is offered. Lack of interest among those eligible for such governmental aid is, according to them, the main factor. They are, in fact, describing a culture of poverty , a mentality that imprisons their clients in ignorance and apathy. This is also presumably the reason why agricultural labourers do not insist on implementation of the minimum wage legislation. Their argumentation continues along the lines that only education and conscientization would lead to a widening of social horizons and could break down inertia in the milieu of the downtrodden. This was the stand adopted by several high-ranking officials from the central Ministry of Labour in New Delhi, during a conference on bonded labour in Gujarat held in Ahmedabad in mid-January 1985. Statements that emphasize the landless labourers’ indifference and docility, in fact, confirm the idea that the rural poor themselves are primarily to blame for their present situation. This is a gross distortion of the truth, since militancy, rather than passivity, marks the agricultural labourers’ attitude. Whenever I ask members of the present generation about changes in living standards, many of them answer that their parents found it easier to earn a livelihood in the old days, while at the same time they are certain that their own children will have a better life. These favourable views of the past and future, combined with a gloomy view of the present, seem to me to demonstrate the overriding spirit of impatience and rebelliousness among the landless today. They are only asking for that emancipation from exploitation and oppression which the government has long since promised them on paper. Yet their complaints go unheard and unregistered. The landowners control the landless with intimidation, and when this fails, with outright terrorization. Those who, with the courage born of despair, take to overt action, have to pay a heavy price for their audacity and are ultimately liquidated if they remain adamant. The state that takes no action when agricultural labourers are murdered, has lost the right to proclaim itself protector of the largest working class in India.

Notes 1 . The research carried out between October 1984 and February 1985, was sponsored by the lndo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development. Enid Perlin took care of the English translation. I gratefully acknowledge the support received from the director and staff of the Centre for Social Studies, Surat. The paper, a first outcome of my stay there, is dedicated to the memory of I.P. Desai, who urged me to write down my findings immediately on completion of my fieldwork. 2 . The only exception is a taluka in the east of the district—rather infertile, isolated and populated by tribals—where there are less than 10,000 agricultural labourers. 3 . For these cane cutters’ life and work, see Breman (1978–79). 4 . Some political turmoil arose over the publication of a shortened Gujarati translation of my study on harvest workers recruited by the cooperative sugar factories in South Gujarat. The rural labour commissioner was asked to make investigations and produce recommendations which would improve work conditions in accordance with existing labour legislation. 5 . I have in mind the agitation in rural areas led by Sharad Joshi. The movement which he started has become increasingly popular in South Gujarat also. 6 . See, for example, the advertisement published in Economic and Political Weekly , 22– 29 December 1984, p. A-172. 7 . See ‘Rural Workers’ Welfare Centres in Gujarat: A Window for the Rural Poor', published by the Gujarat Rural Workers’ Welfare Board, Gandhinagar, n.d. 8 . The increase in wage rates was announced shortly before the state elections in March 1985. The going rate of nine rupees was fixed in October 1982.

References Breman, Jan. 1974. ‘Mobilisation of Landless Labourers: Halpatis of South Gujarat’, Economic and Political Weekly , 9: 489–96. ——. 1978-79. ‘Seasonal Migration and Cooperative Capitalism: The Crushing of Cane and Labour by the Sugar Factories of Bardoli, South Gujarat’, The Journal of Peasant Studies , 6 (1): 41-70, and (2): 169-209. ——. 1985. Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Rural Labour Circulation and Capitalist Production in West India . New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Census of India (1981-1983), Series 5, Gujarat, Part B , ‘General Population Tables— Primary Census Abstracts’, Ahmedabad.

14 Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State 1 AKHIL GUPTA While doing fieldwork in a small village in North India (in 1984–85, and again in 1989) that I have named Alipur, I was struck by how frequently the theme of corruption cropped up in the everyday conversations of villagers. Most of the stories the men told each other in the evening, when the day's work was done and small groups had gathered at habitual places to shoot the breeze, had to do with corruption (bhrashtaachaar) and ‘the state’. 2 Sometimes, the discussion dealt with how someone had managed to outwit an official who wanted to collect a bribe, at other times with ‘the going price’ to get an electrical connection for a new tubewell or to obtain a loan to buy a buffalo, at still other times with which official had been transferred or who was likely to be appointed to a certain position and who replaced, with who had willingly helped his caste members or relatives without taking a bribe, and so on. Sections of the penal code were cited and discussed in great detail, the legality of certain actions to circumvent normal procedure were hotly debated, the pronouncements of district officials discussed at length. At times, it seemed as if I had stumbled in on a specialized discussion with its own esoteric vocabulary, one to which, as a lay person and outsider, I was not privy. What is striking about this situation, in retrospect, is the degree to which the state has become implicated in the minute texture of everyday life. Of course, North Indian villages are not unique in this respect. It is precisely the unexceptionability of the phenomenon that makes the paucity of

analysis on it so puzzling. Does the ubiquity of the state make it invisible? Or is the relative lack of attention to the state in ethnographic work due to a methodology that privileges face-to-face contact and spatial proximity— what one may call a ‘physics of presence’? In this article, I attempt to do an ethnography of the state by examining the discourses of corruption in contemporary India. Studying the state ethnographically involves both the analysis of the everyday practices of local bureaucracies, and the discursive construction of the state in public culture. Such an approach raises fundamental substantive and methodological questions. Substantively, it allows the state to be disaggregated by focusing on different bureaucracies without prejudging their unity or coherence. It also enables one to problematize the relationship between the translocality of ‘the state’ and the necessarily localized offices, institutions, and practices in which it is instantiated. Methodologically, it raises concerns about how one applies ethnographic methods when the aim is to understand the workings of a translocal institution that is made visible in localized practices. What is the epistemological status of the object of analysis? What is the appropriate mode of gathering data, and what is the relevant scale of analysis? 3 I focus on the practices of lower levels of the bureaucracy in a small North Indian town as well as on representations of the state in the mass media. Research on translocal institutions such as ‘the state’ enables us to reflect on the limitations of participant-observations as a technique of fieldwork. The analysis leads me to question Eurocentric distinctions between state and civil society, and offers a critique of the conceptualization of ‘the state’ as a monolithic and unitary entity. An ethnography of the state in a post-colonial context must also come to terms with the legacy of Western scholarship on the state. In this article, I argue that the conventional distinction between state and civil society, on which such a large portion of the scholarship on the state is based, needs to be re-examined. Is it the ‘imperialism of categories’ (Nandy 1990: 69) that allows the particular cultural configuration of ‘state/civil society’ arising from the specific historical experience of Europe to be naturalized and applied universally? Instead of taking this distinction as a point of departure, I use the analysis of the discourse of corruption to question its utility in the Indian context. The discourse of corruption turns out to be a key arena through which the state, citizens, and other organizations and

aggregations come to be imagined. Instead of treating corruption as a dysfunctional aspect of state organizations, I see it as a mechanism through which ‘the state’ itself is discursively constituted. 4 In addition to description and analysis, this article also has a programmatic aim: to mark some new trails along which future anthropological research on the state might profitably proceed. The goal is to map out some of the most important connections in a very large picture, thereby providing a set of propositions that can be developed, challenged, and refuted by others working on this topic. In so doing, this article seeks to add to a fast-growing body of creative work that is pointing the way to a richer analysis of ‘the state’. (Some examples are Abrams 1988; Anagnost 1994; Ashforth 1990; Brow 1988; Cohn 1987a, 1987b; Handelman 1978, 1981; Herzfeld 1992a; Kasaba 1994; Mitchell 1989, 1991; Nugent 1994; Taussig 1992; Urla 1993; Yang 1989.) I should point out that much more needs to be done to lay the empirical basis for ethnographies of the state. Very little rich ethnographic evidence documents what lower-level officials actually do in the name of the state. 5 Research on the state, with its focus on large-scale structures, epochal events, major policies, and ‘important’ people (Evans et al. 1985; Skocpol 1979), has failed to illuminate the quotidian practices (Bourdieu 1977) of bureaucrats that tell us about the effects of the state on the everyday lives of rural people. Surprisingly little research has been conducted in the small towns (in the Indian case, at the level of the subdistrict [tehsil]) where a large number of state officials, constituting the broad base of the bureaucratic pyramid, live and work—the village-level workers, land record keepers, elementary school teachers, agricultural extension agents, the staff of the civil hospital, and others. This is the site where the majority of people in a rural and agricultural country such as India come into contact with ‘the state’, and this is where many of their images of the state are forged. Although research into the practices of local state officials is necessary, it is not by itself sufficient to comprehend how the state comes to be constructed and represented. This necessitates some reflection on the limitations inherent in data collected in ‘the field’. The discourse of corruption, for example, is mediated by local bureaucrats, but cannot be understood entirely by staying within the geographically bounded arena of a subdistrict township. Although in this article I stress the role of public culture and transnational phenomena, I do not want to suggest that the face-

to-face methods of traditional ethnography are irrelevant. But I do want to question the assumption regarding the natural superiority—the assertion of authenticity—implicit in the knowledge claims generated by the fact of ‘being there’ (what one may call the ‘ontological imperative’). Such claims to truth gain their force precisely by clinging to bounded notions of ‘society’ and ‘culture’. Once cultures, societies, and nations are no longer seen to map unproblematically onto different spaces (Appadurai 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Hannerz 1986), one has to rethink the relationship between bodily presence and the generation of ethnographic data. The centrality of fieldwork as rite of passage, as adjudicator of the authenticity of ‘data’, and as the ultimate ground for the judgement of interpretations rests on the rarely interrogated idea that one learns about cultural difference primarily through the phenomenological knowledge gained in ‘the field’. This stress on the experience of being in spatial proximity to ‘the other’, with its concomitant emphasis on sensory perception, is linked to an empiricist epistemology 6 that is unable to comprehend how the state is discursively constituted. It is for this reason that I have combined fieldwork with another practice employed by anthropologists, a practice whose importance is often underplayed in discussions of our collective methodological tool kit. This is the analysis of that widely distributed cultural text, the newspaper (for an early example, see Benedict 1946; an exemplary recent discussion can be found in Herzfeld 1992b). 7 I have looked at representations of the state and of ‘the public’ in English-language and vernacular newspapers in India. By focusing on the discursive construction of the state, I wish to draw attention to the powerful cultural practices by which the state is symbolically represented to its employees and to citizens of the nation. 8 These public cultural practices are enacted in a contested space that cannot be conceptualized as a closed domain circumscribed by national boundaries. Folk, regional, and national ideologies compete for hegemony with each other and with transnational flows of information, tastes, and styles embodied in commodities marketed by multinational capital. 9 Exploring the discursive construction of the state, therefore, necessarily requires attention to transnational processes in the interstate system (Calhoun 1989). The interstate system, in turn, is not a fixed order but is subject to transformations that arise from the actions of nation states and from changes taking place in the international political economy, in this

period that has been variously designated ‘late capitalism’ (Mandel 1975) or the era of ‘flexible accumulation’ (Harvey 1989). For instance, the new liberalization policies followed by the Congress government in India since the 1990 elections can only be understood in the context of a transnational discourse of ‘efficiency’ being promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the collapse of the former Soviet Union, one of India's most important strategic and economic partners. Similarly, intense discussions of corruption in India in 1989, 10 centring on a transaction in the international arms economy, bring home the complex intermingling of local discourses and international practices. What is the theoretical importance of these observations? Briefly, it is that any theory of the state needs to take into account its constitution through a complex set of spatially intersecting representations and practices. This is not to argue that every episode of grass-roots interaction between villagers and state officials can be shown to have transparent transnational linkages, it is merely to note that such linkages have structuring effects that may overdetermine the contexts in which daily practices are carried out. Instead of attempting to search for the local-level or grass-roots conception of the state as if it encapsulated its own reality and treating ‘the local’ as an unproblematic and coherent spatial unit, we must pay attention to the ‘multiply mediated’ 11 contexts through which the state comes to be constructed. In developing my analysis, I have drawn substantially on other ethnographers of South Asia who have paid attention to the state. In her analysis of the rituals of development performed at the inauguration of a large water project in Sri Lanka, Serena Tenekoon (1988) demonstrates that the symbolic distribution of water in all directions across the landscape of the country becomes a means by which the reach of the state is represented. In this case, the literal enactment of traversing the space of the nation comes to signify the ubiquity and translocality of the state. Conversely, James Brow (1988) shows how a government housing project in Sri Lanka makes the state concretely visible in the eyes of villagers. Here, the emphasis is on the possibilities of imagining the translocal that are enabled by the embodiment of the state through spatial markers such as houses. 12 Since the ethnography of the state developed in this article focuses on the discourse of corruption, and since corruption lends itself rather easily to barely concealed stereotypes of the Third World, 13 it might be worthwhile to say something about how I proceed to develop a perspective on the state

that is explicitly anti-orientalist. When notions of corrupt ‘underdeveloped’ countries are combined with a developmentalist perspective, in which ‘state-society relations’ in the Third World are seen as reflecting a prior position in the development of the ‘advanced’ industrial nations, the temptation to compare ‘them’ to ‘our own past’ proves irresistible to many Western scholars. 14 Instead, one needs to ask how one can use the comparative study of Third World political formations to confront the ‘naturalness’ of concepts that have arisen from the historical experience and cultural context of the West. Focusing on the discursive construction of states and social groups allows one to see that the legacy of Western scholarship on the state has been to universalize a particular cultural construction of ‘state-society relations’ in which specific notions of ‘statehood’ and ‘civil society’ are conjoined. 15 Instead of building on these notions, this article asks if one can demonstrate their provincialism in the face of incommensurable cultural and historical contexts. 16 I begin with a series of vignettes that give a sense of the local-level functioning of ‘the state’ and the relationship that rural people have to state institutions. Everyday interactions with state bureaucracies are (to my way of thinking) the most important ingredient in constructions of ‘the state’ forged by villagers and state officials. I then look at the broader field of representations of ‘the state’ in public culture. Finally, I attempt to demonstrate how local-level encounters with the state come together with representations in the mass media. This is followed by the conclusion, which systematically draws out the larger theoretical issues raised in the article.

Encountering ‘The State’ at the Local Level For the majority of Indian citizens, the most immediate context for encountering the state is provided by their relationships with government bureaucracies at the local level. In addition to being promulgated by the mass media, representations of the state are effected through the public practices of different government institutions and agents. In Mandi, the administrative centre closest to Alipur, the offices of the various government bureaucracies themselves served as sites where important information about the state was exchanged and opinions about policies or officials forged. Typically, large numbers of people clustered in small

groups on the grounds of the local courts, the district magistrate's office, the hospital, or the police station, animatedly discussing and debating the latest news. It was in places such as these, where villagers interacted with each other and with residents of the nearby towns, as much as in the mass media, that corruption was discussed and debated. Therefore, looking closely at these settings allows us to obtain a sense of the texture of relations between state officials and clients at the local level. In this section, I draw on three cases that together present a range of relationships between state officials and rural peoples. The first concerns a pair of state officials, occupying lowly but important rungs in the bureaucratic hierarchy, who successfully exploit the inexperience of two rural men. The second case concerns a lower-caste man's partially successful actions to protect himself from the threats of a powerful headman 17 who has allies in the bureaucracy, by appealing to a higher official. The third example draws on a series of actions conducted by the powerful Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU, literally, Indian Peasant Union), a grass-roots farmers’ movement that often strikes terror in the hearts of local state officials. Because they give concrete shape and form to what would otherwise be an abstraction (‘the state’), these everyday encounters provide one of the critical components through which the state comes to be constructed. Small but prosperous, Mandi 18 houses the lowest ends of the enormous state and federal bureaucracy. 19 Most of the important officials of the district, including those whose offices are in Mandi, prefer to live in another, bigger town that serves as the district headquarters. Part of the reason is that rental accommodation is hard to come by in Mandi (as I discovered to my frustration); equally important, it enables them to stay in closer touch with their superior officers. Sharma ji [ ji —an appellation/suffix signifying respect] was a patwari , an official who keeps the land records of approximately five to six villages, or about five thousand plots, lying on the outskirts of Mandi. The patwari is responsible for registering land records, for physically measuring land areas to enter them in the records, and for evaluating the quality of land. The patwari also keeps a record of deaths in a family in the event of a dispute among the heirs about property, or the need to divide it up at some point. There are a number of officials above the patwari whose main—if not sole —duty is to deal with land records. On average, the total comes to about

two officials for each village. Astonishing as this kind of bureaucratic sprawl might appear, it must not be forgotten that land is the principal means of production in this setting. Sharma ji lived in a small, inconspicuous house deep in the old part of the town. Although I was confused at first, I eventually identified which turns in the narrow, winding lanes would lead me there. The lower part of the house consisted of two rooms and a small, enclosed courtyard. One of these rooms had a large door that opened onto the street. This room functioned as Sharma ji 's’ ‘office’. That is where he was usually to be found, surrounded by clients, sycophants, and colleagues. Two men in particular were almost always by his side. One of them, Verma, himself a patwari of Sharma ji 's natal village (and therefore a colleague) was clearly in an inferior position. He functioned as Sharma ji 's alter ego, filling in his ledgers for him, sometimes acting as a front and sometimes as a mediator in complex negotiations over how much money it would take to ‘get a job done’ and generally behaving as a confidant and consultant who helped Sharma ji identify the best strategy for circumventing the administrative and legal constraints on the transfer of land titles. The other person worked as a fulltime Man Friday who did various odd jobs and chores for Sharma ji 's ‘official’ tasks as well as for his household. Two of the side walls of the office were lined with benches; facing the entrance towards the inner part of the room was a raised platform, barely big enough for three people. It was here that Sharma ji sat and held court, 20 and it was here that he kept the land registers for the villages that he administered. All those who had business to conduct came to this ‘office’. At any given time there were usually two or three different groups, interested in different transactions, assembled in the tiny room. Sharma ji conversed with all of them at the same time, often switching from one addressee to another in the middle of a single sentence. Everyone present joined in the discussion of matters pertaining to others. Sharma ji often punctuated his statements by turning to the others and rhetorically asking, ‘Have I said anything wrong?’ or, ‘Is what I have said true or not?’ Most of the transactions conducted in this ‘office’ were relatively straightforward: adding or deleting a name on a land title; dividing up a plot among brothers; settling a fight over disputed farmland. Since plots were separated from each other by small embankments made by farmers themselves and not by fences or other physical barriers, one established a

claim to a piece of land by ploughing it. Farmers with predatory intentions slowly started ploughing just a few inches beyond their boundary each season so that in a short while they could effectively capture a few feet of their neighbours’ territory. If a neighbour wanted to fight back and reclaim his land, he went to the patwari , who settled the dispute by physically measuring the area with a tape measure. Of course, these things ‘cost money’, but in most cases the ‘rates’ were well-known and fixed. But, however open the process of giving bribes and however public the transaction, there was nevertheless a performative aspect that had to be mastered. I will illustrate this with a story of a botched bribe. One day, when I reached Sharma ji 's house in the middle of the afternoon, two young men whose village fell in the jurisdiction of Verma were attempting to add a name to the title of their plot. They were sitting on the near left on one of the side benches. Both were probably in their late teens. Their rubber slippers and unkempt hair clearly marked them to be villagers, an impression reinforced by clothes that had obviously not been stitched by a tailor, who normally catered to the ‘smart’ set of town-dwelling young men. They appeared ill at ease and somewhat nervous in Sharma ji 's room, an impression they tried hard to dispel by adopting an overconfident tone in their conversation. Although I never did find out why they wanted to add a name to the land records, I was told that it was in connection with their efforts to obtain fertilizer on a loan for which the land was to serve as collateral. When I arrived on the scene, negotiations seemed to have broken down already: the men had decided that they were not going to rely on Verma's help in getting the paperwork through the various branches of the bureaucracy, but would instead do it themselves. Sharma ji and the others present (some of whom were farmers anxious to get their own work done) first convinced the young men that they would never be able to do it themselves. This was accomplished by aggressively telling them to go ahead and first try to get the job done on their own and that, if all else failed, they could always come back to Sharma ji . ‘If you don't succeed, I will always be willing to help you’, he said. Thereupon, one of the farmers present told the young men that Sharma ji was a very wellconnected person. Without appearing to brag, Sharma ji himself said that when big farmers and important leaders needed to get their work done, it was to him that they came.

Perhaps because they had been previously unaware of his reputation, the nervous clients seemed to lose all their bravado. They soon started begging for help, saying, ‘Tau [father's elder brother], you know what's best, why should we go running around when you are here?’ Sharma ji then requested Verma to ‘help’ the young men. ‘Help them get their work done’, he kept urging, to which Verma would reply, ‘I never refused to help them.’ The two patwaris then went into an adjoining room, where they had a short, whispered conference. Sharma ji reappeared and announced loudly that they would have to ‘pay for it’. The young men immediately wanted to know how much would be required, to which Sharma ji responded, ‘You should ask him [Verma] that.’ Shortly thereafter, Verma made a perfectly timed re-entrance. The young men repeated the question to him. He said, ‘Give as much as you like.’ When they asked the question again, he said, ‘It is not for me to say. Give whatever amount you want to give.’ The two clients then whispered to each other. Finally, one of them broke the impasse by reaching into his shirt pocket and carefully taking out a few folded bills. He handed Rs 10 to Verma. 21 Sharma ji responded by bursting into raucous laughter, and Verma smiled. Sharma ji told him, ‘You were right’, laughing all the while. Verma said to the young men, ‘I'll be happy to do your work even for Rs 10, but first you'll need the signature of the headman of your village; that's the law.’ Sharma ji told them that they didn't know anything about the law, that it took more than Rs 14 just for the cost of the application, because in order to add a name to a plot, the application would have to be backdated by a few months. At the mention of the headman, the young men became dismayed. They explained that relations were not good between them and the headman, and that they were in opposite camps. I sensed that Verma had known this all along. Sharma ji then told the young men that they should have first found out ‘what it cost’ to get a name added to the register ‘these days’. ‘Go and find out the cost of putting your name in the land register’, he told them, ‘and then give Verma exactly half of that.’ He immediately turned to one of the farmers present and asked him how much he had paid ten years earlier. The man said it had been something like Rs 150. Then both Sharma ji and Verma got up abruptly and left for lunch. The young men turned to the other people and asked them if they knew what the appropriate sum was. All of them gave figures ranging from Rs 130 to Rs 150, but said that their information was dated because that was

how much it had cost ten or more years ago. The young men tried to put a good face on the bungled negotiation by suggesting that it would not be a big loss if they did not succeed in their efforts. If they did not get the loan, they would continue to farm as they usually did—that is, without fertilizer. No one could tell them what the current figure was. Even Man Friday, who was still sitting there, refused to answer, saying it was not for him to intervene, and that it was all up to Sharma ji and Verma. The ‘practice’ of bribe-giving was not, as the young men learned, simply an economic transaction, but a cultural practice that required a great degree of performative competence . When villagers complained about the corruption of state officials, therefore, they were not just voicing their exclusion from government services because these were costly, although that was no small factor. More importantly, they were expressing frustration because they lacked the cultural capital required to negotiate deftly for those services. 22 The entire episode was skilfully managed by Sharma ji and Verma. Although they came away empty-handed from this particular round of negotiations, they knew that the young men would eventually be back and would then have to pay even more than the going rate to get the same job done. Sharma ji appeared in turns as the benefactor and the supplicant, pleading with his colleague on behalf of the clients. Verma managed to appear to be willing to do the work. The act of giving the bribe became entirely a gesture of goodwill on the part of the customers rather than a conscious mechanism to grease the wheels. Interestingly, a great deal of importance was attached to not naming a sum. In this case, state officials got the better of a couple of inexperienced clients. Petty officials, however, do not always have their way. In the implementation of development programmes, for example, local officials often have to seek out beneficiaries in order to meet targets set by higher authorities. The beneficiaries of these programmes can then employ the authority of the upper levels of the bureaucracy to exert some pressure on local officials. Several houses have been constructed in Alipur under two government programmes, the Indira Awas Yojana and the Nirbal Varg Awas Yojana (literally, the Indira Housing Programme and the Weaker Sections Housing Programme, respectively). Both programmes are intended to benefit poor people who do not have a brick (pucca) house. The Indira Awas Yojana was meant for landless harijans (untouchables), whereas the Nirbal Varg Awas

Yojana was for all those who owned less than one acre of land, lacked a brick house, and had an income below a specified limit. 23 I was told that one of the ‘beneficiaries’ was Sripal, so I spoke to him outside his new house. Sripal was a thin, small-boned man, not more than 25 years old, who lived in a cluster of low-caste (Jatav) homes in the village. When I saw the brick one-room dwelling constructed next to his mother's house, I could not help remarking that it looked quite solid. But Sripal immediately dismissed that notion. Sripal was selected for this programme by the village headman, Sher Singh. When his name was approved, the village development worker 24 took him to the town, had his photograph taken, and then opened an account in his name in a bank. For the paperwork, he was charged Rs 200. After that he was given a slip (parchi) that entitled him to pick up predetermined quantities of building material from a store designated by the village development worker. The money required to get the material transported to the construction site came out of his own pocket. The village development worker asked him to pay an additional Rs 500 to get the bricks. Sripal pleaded that he did not have any money. ‘Take Rs 1,000 if you want from the cost of the material [from the portion of the house grant reserved for purchasing materials], but don't ask me to pay you anything.’ Sripal claimed that this was exactly what the village development worker had done, providing him with material worth only Rs 6,000 out of the Rs 7,000 allocated to him. 25 Once again, he had to fork out the transportation expense to have the bricks delivered from a kiln near the village. Sripal claimed that the bricks given to him were inferior yellow bricks (peelay eenth) that had been improperly baked. He also discovered that the cost of labour was supposed to be reimbursed to him. Although he had built the house himself because he was an expert mason, he never received the Rs 300 allocated for labour costs in the programme. As if this was not enough, Sripal did not receive any material for a door and a window, so it was impossible to live in the new house. No official had come to inspect the work to see if there was anything missing. Sripal complained that those whose job it was to inspect the buildings just sat in their offices and approved the construction because they were the ones who had the authority to create the official record. ‘Kaagaz-kalam unhee kay paas hai’ (‘They are the ones who have pen and paper’). Sripal himself is illiterate.

Frustrated about his doorless house, he lodged complaints at the block office and at the bank that lent him the money for construction. Meanwhile, Sher Singh, who had been employing Sripal as a daily labourer on his farm, became angry at him for refusing to come to work one day. Sripal explained that he couldn't possibly have gone because his relatives had come over that day and that to leave them would have been construed as inhospitable. In any case, Sripal said, he could not do any heavy work because he had broken his arm some time ago. When Sher Singh found out that Sripal had complained about him and the village development worker at the block office, he threatened to beat him up so badly that he would never enter the village again. Fearing the worst, Sripal fled from the village and went to live with his in-laws. Despite the threat to his life, Sripal was not daunted in his efforts to seek justice. When he saw that his complaints elicited no response, he approached a lawyer to draft a letter to the district magistrate, the highest administrative authority in the area. This strategy paid off in that a police contingent was sent to the village to investigate. When I asked Sripal to tell me what the letter said, he produced a copy of it for me. ‘What can I tell you?’ he asked. ‘Read it yourself.’ The letter alleged that the village development worker had failed to supply the necessary material and that because the headman had threatened to beat him up, he had been forced to flee the village. After the police visit, Sher Singh made peace with Sripal. He even hired Sripal to construct a home for another person under the same programme. In addition, Sher Singh stopped asking Sripal to come to labour on his farm. But the village development worker threatened Sripal with imprisonment unless he paid back Rs 3,000 towards the cost of completing the house. 26 ‘One of my relatives is a jail warden (thanedaar) ’, he reportedly told Sripal. ‘If you don't pay up, I'll have you put away in jail.’ Sitting in front of the empty space that was to be the door to his house, Sripal told me that he was resigned to going to jail. ‘What difference does it make?’ he asked. ‘Living like this is as good as being dead.’ Even though he was ultimately unsuccessful in his appeals for justice, Sripal's case demonstrates that even members of the subaltern classes have a practical knowledge of the multiple levels of state authority. Faced with the depredations of the headman and village development worker, Sripal had appealed to the authority of a person three rungs higher in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Because the central and state governments are

theoretically committed to protecting Scheduled Caste people such as Sripal, his complaint regarding the threat to his life was taken quite seriously. Sending the police to the village was a clear warning to Sher Singh that if he dared to harm Sripal physically, he would risk retaliation from the repressive arm of the state. Before leaving this episode with Sripal, I want to address explicitly what it tells us about transnational linkages. Clearly, one cannot expect to find visible transnational dimensions to every grass-roots encounter; that would require a kind of immediate determination that is empirically untrue and analytically indefensible. For example, IMF conditionalities do not directly explain this particular episode in the house-building programme. But by forcing the Indian government to curtail domestic expenditure, the conditionalities do have budgetary implications for such programmes. These influence which programmes are funded, how they are implemented and at what levels, who is targetted, and for how many years such programmes continue. Similarly, if one wants to understand why development programmes such as building houses for the poor exist in the first place and why they are initiated and managed by the state, one must place them in the context of a regime of ‘development’ that came into being in the post-War international order of decolonized nation states (Escobar 1984, 1988; Ferguson 1990). What happens at the grass roots is thus complexly mediated, sometimes through multiple relays, sometimes more directly, by such linkages. 27 Sripal's experience of pitting one organization of the state against others and of employing the multiple layers of state organizations to his advantage no doubt shaped his construction of the state. At the same time, he appeared defeated in the end by the procedures of a bureaucracy whose rules he could not comprehend. Sripal was among those beneficiaries of ‘development’ assistance who regretted ever accepting help. He became deeply alienated by the very programmes that the state employed to legitimize its rule . The implementation of development programmes, therefore, forms a key arena where representations of the state are constituted and where its legitimacy is contested. One can also find contrasting instances where local officials are on the receiving end of villagers’ disaffection with state institutions. Some examples are provided by several actions of the BKU. One of the most frequent complaints of farmers is that they have to pay bribes to officials of

the hydel department to replace burnt-out transformers. Each such transformer typically serves five to ten tubewells. A young farmer related a common incident to me. The transformer supplying electricity to his tubewell and those of eleven of his neighbours blew out. So they contributed Rs 150 each (approximately $10 at exchange rates prevailing then) and took the money to the assistant engineer of the hydel department. They told him that their crops were dying for lack of water and that they were in deep trouble. He reportedly said, ‘What can I do? We don't have the replacement equipment at the present time.’ So they gave him the Rs 1,800 they had pooled, and requested that the transformer be replaced as soon as possible. He took the money and promised them that the job would be done in a few days, as soon as the equipment was in. Being an ‘honest’ man (that is, one true to his word), he had the transformer installed three days later. When the same situation recurred shortly thereafter, the young man went to the Kisan Union people and requested that they help them get a new transformer. So about fifty of them climbed on tractors, went straight to the executive engineer's house and camped on his lawn. (A common form of civil disobedience in India is to gherao [encircle and prevent movement of] a high official). They refused to move until a new transformer had been installed in the village. The executive engineer promised them that he ‘would send men at once’. Sure enough, the linemen came the following day and replaced it. Not all such incidents ended amicably. The quick response of these officials was due to the fact that the Kisan Union had already established itself as a powerful force in that particular area, as will be evident from a few examples. In one incident, a crowd walked off with six transformers from an electricity station in broad daylight (Aaj 1989f). The farmers no longer feared the police and revenue officials, on occasion ‘arresting’ the officials, tying them to trees, and making them do ‘sit-ups’. They refused to pay electricity dues—up to 60 per cent of agricultural sector dues remain unpaid in a nearby district—and forced ‘corrupt’ officials to return money allegedly taken as bribes. I also heard about an incident in an adjacent village where employees of the electricity board were caught stealing some copper wire from a transformer by irate villagers who proceeded to beat them up and ‘jail’ them in a village house. It should be clear from all the incidents described above that lower-level officials play a crucial role in citizens’ encounters with ‘the state’.

Obviously, no singular characterization of the nature and content of the interaction of villagers and bureaucrats is possible. In contrast to Sharma ji and Verma (who manipulate their gullible clients) stand the officials who are manhandled by the peasant activists of the BKU. Similarly, just as local officials employ their familiarity with bureaucratic procedures to carry out or obstruct a transaction by manoeuvring between different levels of the administrative hierarchy, so too do subaltern people such as Sripal demonstrate a practical competence in using the hierarchical nature of state institutions to their own ends. At the local level, it becomes difficult to experience the state as an ontically coherent entity: what one confronts instead is much more discrete and fragmentary—land records officials, village development workers, the electricity board, headmen, the police, and the block development office. Yet (and it is this seemingly contradictory fact that we must always keep in mind) it is precisely through the practices of such local institutions that a translocal institution such as the state comes to be imagined. The local-level encounters with the state described in this section help us discern another significant point. Officials such as Sharma ji , who may very well constitute a majority of state employees occupying positions at the bottom of the bureaucratic pyramid, pose an interesting challenge to Western notions of the boundary between ‘state’ and ‘society’ in some obvious ways. The Western historical experience has been built on states that put people in locations distinct from their homes—in offices, cantonments, and courts—to mark their ‘rationalized’ activity as office holders in a bureaucratic apparatus. People such as Sharma ji eliminate this distinction not only between their roles as public servants and as private citizens at the site of their activity, but also in their styles of operation. 28 Almost all other similarly placed officials in different branches of the state operate in an analogous manner. One has a better chance of finding them at the roadside tea stalls and in their homes than in their offices. Whereas modernization theorists would invariably interpret this as further evidence of the failure of efficient institutions to take root in a Third World context, one might just as easily turn the question around and enquire into the theoretical adequacy (and judgemental character) of the concepts through which such actions are described. In other words, if officials like Sharma ji and the village development worker are seen as thoroughly blurring the boundaries between ‘state’ and ‘civil society’, it is perhaps because those

categories are descriptively inadequate to the lived realities that they purport to represent. Finally, it may be useful to draw out the implications of the ethnographic material presented in this section for what it tells us about corruption and the implementation of policy. First, the people described here—Sharma ji , the village development worker, the electricity board officials—are not unusual or exceptional in the manner in which they conduct their official duties, in their willingness to take bribes, for example, or in their conduct towards different classes of villagers. Second, despite the fact that lowerlevel officials’ earnings from bribes are substantial, it is important to locate them in a larger ‘system’ of corruption in which their superior officers are firmly implicated. In fact, Sharma ji 's bosses depend on his considerable ability to manoeuvre land records for their own transactions, which are several orders of magnitude larger than his. His is a ‘volume business’, theirs a ‘high-margin’ one. He helps them satisfy their clients, and in the process, buys protection and insurance for his own activities. This latter act calls for elaboration. It is often claimed that even welldesigned government programmes fail in their implementation, and that the best of plans founder due to widespread corruption at the lower levels of the bureaucracy. If this is intended to explain why government programmes fail, it is patently inaccurate (as well as being class-biased). For it is clear that lower-level officials are only one link in a chain of corrupt practices that extends to the apex of state organizations and reaches far beyond them, to electoral politics (Wade 1982, 1984, 1985). Politicians raise funds through senior bureaucrats for electoral purposes, senior bureaucrats squeeze this money from their subordinates as well as directly from projects that they oversee, and subordinates follow suit. The difference is that whereas higher-level state officials raise large sums from the relatively few people who can afford to pay these to them, lower-level officials collect them in small figures and on a daily basis from a very large number of people. It is for this reason that corruption is so much more visible at the lower levels. The ‘system’ of corruption is, of course, not just a brute collection of practices whose most widespread execution occurs at the local level. It is also a discursive field that enables the phenomenon to be labelled, discussed, practised, decried, and denounced. The next section is devoted to

the analysis of the discourse of corruption, and specially to its historically and regionally situated character.

The Discourse of Corruption in Public Culture Analysing the discourse of corruption draws attention to the powerful cultural practices by which the state is symbolically represented to its employees and to citizens of the nation. 29 Representations of the state are constituted, contested, and transformed in public culture. Public culture is a zone of cultural debate conducted through the mass media, other mechanical modes of reproduction and the visible practices of institutions such as the state (Appadurai 1990; Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988; Gilroy 1987; Gurevitch et al. 1982; Hall et al. 1980; Waites et al. 1982). It is ‘the site and stake’ (Hall 1982) of struggles for cultural meaning. For this reason, the analysis of reports in local and national newspapers tells us a great deal about the manner in which ‘the state’ comes to be imagined. 30 The importance of the media was brought home to me when, barely two months after Rajiv Gandhi was elected prime minister in late 1984, a higher-caste village elder whose son was a businessman with close connections to the Congress (I) told me, ‘Rajiv has failed.’ I was surprised to hear him say this and asked why he thought so. He replied, ‘Rajiv promised to eradicate corruption in his campaign but has it happened? He hasn't done anything about it.’ Although Rajiv Gandhi had not visited the area around Alipur during his campaign, this man was keenly aware of all of his campaign promises. Like many others in Alipur, he listened nightly to the BBC World Service news broadcast in Hindi as well as to the government-controlled national radio (Akashvani). He was well-informed on international events and would often ask me detailed questions regarding contemporary events in the United States or Iran. Although radio and television obviously play a significant role as mass media, newspapers are perhaps the most important mechanism in public culture for the circulation of discourses on corruption. 31 In the study of translocal phenomena such as ‘the state’, newspapers contribute to the raw material necessary for ‘thick’ description. This should become evident by comparing newspaper reports—conceptualized as cultural texts and sociohistorical documents—to oral interviews. Since newspaper reports are invariably filed by locally resident correspondents, they constitute, as do

oral interviews, a certain form of situated knowledge. Obviously, perceiving them as having a privileged relation to the truth of social life is naive; they have much to offer us, however, when seen as a major discursive form through which daily life is narrativized and collectivities imagined. Of course, the narratives presented in newspapers are sifted through a set of institutional filters, but their representations are not, for that reason alone, more deeply compromised. Treated with benign neglect by students of contemporary life, they mysteriously metamorphose into invaluable ‘field data’ once they have yellowed around the edges and fallen apart at the creases. 32 And yet it is not entirely clear by what alchemy time turns the ‘secondary’ data of the anthropologist into the ‘primary’ data of the historian. Apart from theoretical reasons that may be adduced to support the analysis of newspaper reports, the importance of all vernacular newspapers, whether regional or national dailies, lies in the fact that they carry special sections devoted to local news. 33 These are distributed only in the region to which the news applies. Thus, if one picks up the same newspaper in two different cities in Uttar Pradesh, some of the pages inside will have entirely different contents. News about a particular area, therefore, can only be obtained by subscribing to newspapers within that area. In this restricted sense, newspaper reports about a particular area can only be obtained within ‘the field’. 34 The method of studying the state advanced in this article relates the discourse of corruption in the vernacular and English-language press to statements made by villagers and state officials. We will see that local discourses and practices concerning corruption were intimately linked with the reportage found in vernacular and national newspapers. This point will be demonstrated by first looking at a few examples from the national English-language press and then mostly at vernacular newspapers. 35 Corruption as an issue dominated two of the three national elections held in the 1980s. In its summary of the decade, the fortnightly newsmagazine India Today headlined the section on ‘The ’80s: Politics’ in the following manner: ‘The politics of communalism, corruption and separatism dominates an eventful decade’ (Chawla 1990: 18). 36 Rajiv Gandhi's election in November 1984 was fought largely on the slogans of the eradication of corruption and preserving the nation's integrity in the face of separatist threats from Sikhs. Precisely because he was initially dubbed ‘Mr

Clean’, the subject of corruption later came to haunt him as his administration came under a cloud for allegedly accepting kickbacks from Bofors, a Swedish arms manufacturer. In fact, Bofors became the centrepiece of the opposition's successful effort to overthrow his regime. In the elections of 1989, in which a non-Congress government came to power for only the second time in forty-three years of electoral politics, another Mr Clean, V.P. Singh, emerged as the leader. He had earlier been unceremoniously booted out of Rajiv Gandhi's cabinet because, as defence minister, he had started an investigation into the ‘Bofors Affair’. The effect of Bofors was electorally explosive precisely because it became a symbol of corruption at all levels of the state. For example, the conductor on the notoriously inefficient Uttar Pradesh State Roadways bus justified not returning change to me by saying, ‘If Rajiv Gandhi can take 64 crore in bribes, what is the harm in my taking 64 paisa on a ticket?’ 37 The discourse of corruption, however, went far beyond just setting the terms of electoral competition between political parties. It not only helped to define ‘the political’, but also served to constitute ‘the public’ that was perceived to be reacting to corruption. Since this was done largely through the mass media, we must pay careful attention to newspapers as cultural texts that give us important clues to the political culture of the period. In a series of major pre-election surveys, the widely read metropolitan English daily, The Times of India , attempted to analyse the political impact of Bofors and set out to establish how the electorate viewed corruption. One of its articles begins by quoting a villager who remarked, ‘If one [political party, i.e., Congress] is a poisonous snake, the other [opposition party] is a cobra’ (The Times of India 1989: 1). The article went on to say: ‘Whether the Congress is in power or the opposition makes no difference to the common man and woman who has to contend with proliferating corruption which affects every sphere of life…. Bofors doesn't brush against their lives. The pay-off for a ration card or a job does’ (ibid.). The article further elaborated the relationship between the ‘ordinary citizen’ and the state with reference to the role of formal politics and politicians. In U.P., the majority felt that [increasing corruption] stemmed from the growing corruption in political circles. M.P. Verma, a backward class leader from Gonda pointed out that politicians today are driven by a one-point programme—to capture power at all costs. And the vast sums expended on elections are obtained by unfair means. ‘Without

corruption there is no polities’, said Aminchand Ajmera, a businessman from Bhopal (The Times of India 1989: 1).

The theme of corruption was prominent in an article in India Today on a central government scheme to help the poor, which pointed out how the resources being allocated by the central government were being misused by the state government in Madhya Pradesh (1989). 38 In this example, formal politics was not reduced to competition among political parties and the bureaucratic apparatus (where payoffs for jobs are given) was not confused with the regime (where the benefits of Bofors presumably went). Instead, the discourse of corruption became a means by which a fairly complex picture of the state was symbolically constructed in public culture. In addition, I examined the local editions of six Hindi newspapers with different political orientations most commonly read in the Mandi area: Aaj, Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujaala, Hindustan, Rashtriya Sahara , and Jansatta . There were significant differences between the English-language magazines and the newspapers mentioned above, with their urban, educated, ‘middleclass’ readership, and the vernacular press. The reason lay in the structural location of the national English-language dailies within the ‘core’ regions— the urban centres of capital, high politics, administration, and education. The vernacular newspapers maintained a richer sense of the multilayered nature of the state, because their reportage was necessarily focused on events in different localities, which corresponded to lower levels of the state hierarchy. They could not, however, simultaneously ignore events at the higher levels of state (region) and nation. By contrast, metropolitan newspapers focused almost exclusively on large-scale events, with local bureaucracies featuring chiefly in the letters of complaint written by citizens about city services. The vernacular press, therefore, particularly clearly delineated the multilayered and pluricentric nature of ‘the state’. The Hindi newspapers with limited regional circulations, read mostly by the residents of the many small towns and large villages dotting the countryside, in fact were, as opposed to the ‘national’ Hindi dailies such as the Navbharat Times , much less prone to reify the state as a monolithic organization with a single chain of command. They made a practice of explicitly naming specific departments of the state bureaucracy. The vernacular press also seemed to pursue stories of corruption with greater zeal than its metropolitan counterpart. 39

For example, the daily Aaj had headlines such as the following: ‘Police Busy Warming own Pockets’ (1989a), 40 ‘Plunder in T. B. Hospital’ (1989e), and ‘Farmers Harassed by Land Consolidation Official’ (1989d). In none of these reports was the state (sarkar) invoked as a unitary entity. In all of them, specific departments were named, and very often specific people as well. They also documented in great detail exactly what these corrupt practices were. For example, the article on the tuberculosis hospital stated exactly how much money was ‘charged’ for each step (Rs 5 for a test, Rs 10 for the doctor, Rs 5 for the compounder, and so on) in a treatment that was supposed to be provided free of charge. The article on the land consolidation officer named him and stated how much money he demanded in bribes from specific farmers (also named). Similarly, the news story on the police reported that a specific precinct was extorting money from vehicle owners by threatening to issue bogus citations. Two features of these reports were particularly striking. First, state officials higher up the hierarchy were often depicted as completely unresponsive to complaints and even as complicit with the corrupt practices. ‘Despite several complaints by citizens to the head of the region, nothing has been done’, was a familiar refrain in the reports. For instance, one short report stated that the dealer who had the contract to distribute subsidized rations of sugar and kerosene was selling them on the black market with political protection and the full knowledge of regional supervisors (Aaj 1989b). Similarly, another story, ‘To Get Telephone To Work, Feed Them Sweets’ (Aaj 1989c), reported that corrupt employees of the telephone department told customers that they could go ahead and complain as much as they wanted, but, unless the telephone workers got their favourite sweetmeats, 41 the customers’ telephones would not work. The second noteworthy feature in regional newspaper accounts was their emphasis on, and construction of, the public . A common discursive practice was to talk of ‘the public’ (janata) that was being openly exploited by the police, or ‘the citizens’ (naagarik) who were harassed by blackmarketeering, or ‘the people’ (log) whose clear accusation against the hospital was given voice in the paper, or ‘simple farmers’ (bholaaybhaalaay kisan) who were ruthlessly exploited by the land consolidation officer. In all cases, the function of the press appeared to be that of creating a space in which the grievances of the masses could be aired and the common good (janhit) pursued.

The press was, of course, doing much more than simply airing preexisting grievances. The state constructed here was one that consisted of widely disparate institutions with little or no coordination among them, of multiple levels of authority, none of which were accountable to ordinary people, and employees (secure in the knowledge that they could not be fired) who treated citizens with contempt. At the same time, these reports also created subjects 42 who were represented as being exploited, powerless, and outraged. I foreground the newspapers’ functions in order to draw attention to the rhetorical strategy deployed by the mass media to galvanize into action citizens who expect state institutions to be accountable to them. Although I have sharply differentiated the English-language and vernacular press in their representations of ‘the state’ and the construction of subjects, one must keep two caveats in mind at all times. First, if one looks at newspapers from different regions of Uttar Pradesh, and published in other languages (for example, Urdu), wide variations are to be found within the vernacular press. 43 Second, the mass media are not the only important source for the circulation of representations of ‘the state’ in public culture. Police and administration officials repeatedly voice their frustration at their inability to counter ‘wild stories’ and ‘rumours’ that contest and contradict the official version of events. Police officials in an adjoining district are quoted in The Times of India as saying, ‘They go about spreading rumours and we can't fight them effectively. These rumours help gather crowds. And the agitated crowd then turn on the police, provoking a clash’ (Mitra and Ahmed 1989: 12). The ‘bush telegraph’ (sic) spreads rumours quickly and convincingly (Mitra 1989). 44 Unlike other technologies of communication such as newspapers, radio and television, rumour cannot be controlled by simply clamping down on the source of production (Coombe 1993). Rumour therefore becomes a specially effective vehicle to challenge official accounts, especially when agencies of the state transgress local standards of behaviour. By definition, corruption is a violation of norms and standards of conduct. 45 The other face of a discourse of corruption, therefore, is a discourse of accountability. 46 Herzfeld puts the emphasis in the right place when he says that ‘accountability is a socially produced, culturally saturated amalgam of ideas about person, presence, and polity…[whose] meaning is culturally specific…[and whose] management of personal or collective identity cannot break free of social experience’ (1992a: 47). Expectations of ‘right’

behaviour, standards of accountability, and norms of conduct for state officials, in other words, come from social groups as well as from ‘the state’. 47 Sometimes these standards and norms converge; more often, they do not. Thus, there are always divergent and conflicting assessments of whether a particular course of action is ‘corrupt’. Subjects’ deployment of discourses of corruption are necessarily mediated by their structural location (this point is developed further below). But state officials are also multiply positioned within different regimes of power: in consequence, they simultaneously employ, and are subject to, quite varying discourses of accountability. The manner in which these officials negotiate the tensions inherent in their location in their daily practices both helps to create certain representations of the state and powerfully shapes assessments of it, thereby affecting its legitimacy. In fact, struggles for legitimacy can be interpreted in terms of the effort to construct the state and ‘the public’ symbolically in a particular manner. Moreover, if one were to document the transformations in the discourse of corruption from colonial times to the present (a project beyond the scope of this article), it would be clear that the post-colonial state has itself generated new discourses of accountability. Actions tolerated or considered legitimate under colonial rule may be classified as ‘corrupt’ by the rule-making apparatuses of the independent nation state because an electoral democracy is deemed accountable to ‘the people’. The sense of pervasive corruption in a country such as India might then itself be a consequence of the changes in the discourse of accountability promulgated by post-colonial nationalists. In addition, significant changes during the post-colonial period have arisen from the pressures of electoral politics (as evidenced by the Bofors controversy) and from peasant mobilization. In the Mandi region, the Kisan Union has been very successful in organizing peasants against the state by focusing on the issue of corruption among lower levels of the bureaucracy. Although there are variations in the discourse of corruption within regions and during the post-colonial era, the end of colonialism constitutes a significant transition. One of the reasons for this is that nationalist as opposed to colonial regimes seek the kind of popular legitimacy that will enable them to act in the name of ‘the people’. They thus place new responsibilities on state employees and vest new rights in subjects who are then constituted as citizens. The post-colonial state consciously sets out to create subject positions unknown during the colonial era: ‘citizenship’ does

not just mark inclusiveness in a territorial domain, but indicates a set of rights theoretically invested in subjects who inhabit the nation. 48 One of the crucial ingredients of discourses of citizenship in a populist democracy such as India has been that state employees are considered accountable to ‘the people’ of the country. The discourse of corruption, by marking those actions that constitute an infringement of such rights, thus acts to represent the rights of citizens to themselves. 49 The role of the Kisan Union further highlights significant regional variations in the discourse of corruption. Western Uttar Pradesh, the region where Mandi is located, has been the centre of very successful agrarian mobilizations led by the class of well-to-do peasants. This movement was first led by Chaudhary Charan Singh, a former prime minister who consistently mounted an attack on the ‘urban bias’ of state policies. It has now been given a new direction by the Kisan Union led by Mahinder Singh Tikait. 50 The landowning castes in this region have become fairly prosperous, as they have been the chief beneficiaries of the Green Revolution. But this new-found wealth has yet to be translated into bureaucratic power and cultural capital. In other words, given the central role that state institutions play in rural life, these groups seek to stabilize the conditions for the reproduction of their dominance. Because they perceive the state to be acting against their interests, they deploy the discourse of corruption to undermine the credibility of the state and to attack the manner in which government organizations operate. 51 The discourse of corruption is central to our understanding of the relationship between the state and social groups, precisely because it plays this dual role of enabling people to construct the state symbolically and to define themselves as citizens. For it is through such representations, and through the public practices of various government agencies, that the state comes to be marked and delineated from other organizations and institutions in social life. The state itself, and whatever is construed to stand apart from it—community, polity, society, civil society (Kligman 1990), political society—are all culturally constructed in specific ideological fields. It is, hence, imperative that we constantly contextualize the construction of the state within particular historical and cultural conjunctures. I have employed the discourse of corruption as a means to demonstrate how the state comes to be imagined in one such historical and cultural context. The discourse of corruption here functions as a diagnostic of the state.

The Imagined State Banwari, a Scheduled Caste resident of Ashanwad hamlet, twenty-five km from Jaipur said, ‘I haven't seen the vidhan sabha or the Lok Sabha. 52 The only part of the government I see is the police station four kms from my house. And that is corrupt. The police demand bribes and don't register complaints of scheduled caste people like me’ (The Times of India 1989: 71).

So far, this article has dealt with the practices of local levels of the bureaucracy and the discourses of corruption in public culture, respectively. Together, they enable a certain construction of the state that meshes the imagined translocal institution with its localized embodiments. The government, in other words, is being constructed here in the imagination and everyday practices of ordinary people. Of course, this is exactly what ‘corporate culture’ and nationalism do: they make possible and then naturalize the construction of such non-localizable institutions. It then becomes very important to understand the mechanisms, or modalities, that make it possible to imagine the state. What is the process whereby the ‘reality’ of translocal entities comes to be experienced? To answer this question, one must grasp the pivotal role of public culture, which represents one of the most important modalities for the discursive construction of ‘the state’. Obviously, not everyone imagines the state in quite the same manner. So far, very little research has been done on the relationship between diversely located groups of people and their employment of the different media of representation and of varying resources of cultural capital in imagining ‘the state’. For example, Ram Singh and his sons are relatively prosperous men from one of the lowest castes (Jatav) in Alipur. They had recently acquired a television set as part of the dowry received in the marriage of one of the sons. Ram Singh told me, in a confession born of a mixture of pride and embarrassment, that since the television had arrived, their farm work had suffered, because, instead of irrigating the crop, they would all sit down and watch television. (Both the pumpsets used for irrigation and the television set were dependent on erratic and occasional supplies of electricity.) Television was a constant point of reference in Ram Singh's conversation. I interviewed Ram Singh in the context of the impending elections (the elections took place in December 1989; the conversation dates from late

July). He said: The public is singing the praises of Rajiv (Gandhi). 53 He is paying really close attention to the needs of poor people (Bahut gaur kar rahe hain) . Rajiv has been travelling extensively in the rural areas and personally finding out the problems faced by the poor. For this reason, I will definitely support the Congress (I). We consider the government which supports us small people as if it were our mother and father (Usi ko ham maa-baap key samaan maantey hain) . If it weren't for the Congress, no one would pay any attention to the smaller castes (chotee jaat) . Not even God looks after us, only the Congress. At this point, his son intervened: The Congress is for all the poor not just for the lower castes. It is exerting itself to the utmost, trying to draw people into [government] jobs (Rajiv jor laga rahe hain, naukri mein khichai kar rahe hain) . Ram Singh returned to the discussion: Although the government has many good schemes, the officials in the middle eat it all (beech mey sab khaa jaate hain) . The government is making full efforts to help the poor, but the officials don't allow any of the schemes to reach the poor.

‘Doesn't the government know that officials are corrupt?’ I asked. ‘Why doesn't it do anything?’ Ram Singh replied: It does know a little bit but not everything. The reason is that the voice of the poor doesn't reach people at the top (Garibon ki awaaz vahaan tak pahunchti nahin) . If, for example, the government sets aside four lakhs for a scheme, only one lakh will actually reach us—the rest will be taken out in the middle. 54

Ram Singh's position here displays some continuity with an older, hierarchical vision cf the state. 55 Typically, in such views, the ruler appears as benevolent and charitable, whereas the local official is seen as corrupt. While this may very well be the case, I think that one can adequately explain Ram Singh's outlook by examining contemporary practices rather than the sedimentation of beliefs. 56 One should look at practices of the state that reinforce this outlook. When a complaint of corruption is lodged against a local official, the investigation is always conducted by an official of a higher rank. Higher officials are thus seen as providing redressals for grievances and punishing local officials for corrupt behaviour. Ram Singh's case reminds us that all constructions of the state have to be situated with respect to the location of the speaker. Ram Singh's particular

position helps us understand why he imagines the state as he does. He is an older, Scheduled Caste man whose household now owns one of the five television sets in the village, a key symbol of upward mobility. Several of his sons are educated, and two of them have obtained relatively good government jobs as a consequence. 57 The Scheduled Castes of this area in general, and the Jatavs in particular, have historically supported successive Congress regimes. The first thing that impresses one about Ram Singh's interpretation of ‘the state’ is how clearly he understands its composition as an entity with multiple layers and diverse locales and centres. Although the word for regime and state is the same in Hindi ( sarkar ), 58 Ram Singh maintains a distinction between the regime and the bureaucracy . He sees the regime's good intentions towards the lower castes being frustrated by venal state officials. Clearly, Ram Singh has a sense that there are several layers of government above the one that he has always dealt with (the very top personified by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi), and that the different levels can exert opposing pulls on policy (specifically, those that affect a Scheduled Caste person like him). Interestingly, Ram Singh reproduces an apologetic for the failure of policy (‘the formulation is all right, it is the implementers that are to blame’) pervasively found in India's ‘middle classes’, delivered by politicians belonging to the regime in power, and reproduced in the work of academics, higher bureaucrats, and sympathetic officials of international agencies. The second striking fact about Ram Singh's testimony is that, apart from his nuanced description of the state as a disaggregated and multilayered institution, his analysis closely parallels a discourse on the state that is disseminated by the mass media and is, therefore, translocal. Ram Singh's example demonstrates the importance of public culture in the discursive construction of the state: he talks knowledgeably about ‘the public's’ perception of Rajiv and of Rajiv's itinerary. His son's perception of the Congress as being ‘for all the poor’ clearly also owes a great deal to massmediated sources. My suspicion that the close association with Rajiv Gandhi and the explanation about the corrupt middle levels of the state was influenced by the impact of television gained force when one of his sons explained: 59 We are illiterate people whose knowledge would be confined to the village. This way [i.e., by watching television], we learn a little bit about the outside world, about the

different parts of India, about how other people live, we get a little more worldly (Kuch duniyaadaari seekh leyte hai). 60

In the build-up to the elections, the government-controlled television network (Doordarshan) spent most of the nightly newscast following Rajiv Gandhi on his campaign tours. Obviously, it was not just the country that was being imagined on television through the representation of its different parts, but also the national state through the image of ‘its’ leader. Popular understanding of the state, therefore, are constituted in a discursive field where the mass media play a critical role. Ram Singh's words reveal the important part that national media play in ‘local’ discourse on the state. Clearly, it is not possible to deduce Ram Singh's understanding of ‘the state’ entirely from his personal interactions with the bureaucracy; conversely, it is apparent that he is not merely parroting the reports he obtains from television and newspaper. 61 Rather, what we see from this example is the articulation between (necessarily fractured) hegemonic discourses and the inevitably situated and interested interpretations of subaltern subjects. Ram Singh's everyday experiences lead him to believe that there must be government officials and agencies (whose presence, motives, and actions are represented to him through the mass media) interested in helping people like him. Only that could explain why his sons have succeeded in obtaining highly-prized government jobs despite their neglect by local schoolteachers and their ill-treatment by local officials. Yet when he talks about ‘the public’, and with a first-person familiarity about Rajiv's efforts on behalf of the poor, he is clearly drawing on a mass-mediated knowledge of what that upper level of government comprises, who the agents responsible for its actions are, and what kinds of policies and programmes they are promoting. 62

There is obviously no Archimedean point from which to visualize ‘the state’, only numerous situated knowledges (Haraway 1988). Bureaucrats, for example, imagine it through statistics (Hacking 1982), official reports, and tours, whereas citizens do so through newspaper stories, dealings with particular government agencies, the pronouncements of politicians, and so forth. Constructions of the state clearly vary according to the manner in which different actors are positioned. It is, therefore, important to situate a certain symbolic construction of the state with respect to the particular context in which it is realized. The importance of the mass media should

not blind us to the differences that exist in the way that diversely situated people imagine the state. 63 For instance, Ram Singh's position as a relatively well-to-do lower-caste person, whose family has benefited from rules regarding employment quotas for Scheduled Castes, explains his support for the higher echelons of government. At the same time, his interaction with local officials has taught him that they, like the powerful men in the villages, have little or no sympathy for lower-caste people like him. Therefore, he has a keen sense of the differences among different levels of the state. On the other hand, if he seems to share with the middle class a particular view of the failure of government programmes, it is the result of the convergence of what he has learned from his everyday encounters with the ‘state’, with what he has discerned (as his son indicates) from the mass media. Congress rhetoric about being the party of the poor obviously resonates with Ram Singh's experience; that is why he calls the Congress government his guardians (maa-baap) and blames the officials in the middle for not following through with government programmes. Ram Singh's view of the state, thus, is shaped both by his own encounters with local officials and by the translocal imagining of the state made possible by viewing television.

Conclusion In this article, I have focused on discourses of corruption in public culture and villagers’ everyday encounters with local government institutions in order to work towards an ethnography of the state in contemporary India. Such a study raises a large number of complex conceptual and methodological problems, of which I have attempted to explore those that I consider central to any understanding of state institutions and practices. The first problem has to do with the reification inherent in unitary descriptions of ‘the state’. 64 When one analyses the manner in which villagers and officials encounter the state, it becomes clear that it must be conceptualized in terms far more decentralized and disaggregated than has been the case so far. Rather than take the notion of ‘the state’ as a point of departure, we should leave open an analytical question as to the conditions under which the state does operate as a cohesive and unitary whole. 65 All the ethnographic data presented in this article—the cases of Sharma ji , Sripal, Ram Singh, and the Kisan Union, and the reports from the

vernacular press—point to a recognition of multiple agencies, organizations, levels, agendas, and centres that resists straightforward analytical closure. The second major problem addressed in this article concerns the translocality of state institutions. I have argued that any analysis of the state requires us to conceptualize a space that is constituted by the intersection of local, regional, national, and transnational phenomena. Accordingly, I have stressed the role of public culture in the discursive construction of the state. Bringing the analysis of public culture together with the study of the everyday practices of lower levels of the bureaucracy helps us understand how the reality of translocal entities comes to be felt by villagers and officials. The third important argument advanced in this article, also tied to the significance of public culture for an analysis of the state, has to do with the discursive construction of the state. Foregrounding the question of representation allows us to see the modalities by which the state comes to be imagined. The discourses of corruption and accountability together constitute one mechanism through which the Indian state came to be discursively constructed in public culture. It must be kept in mind that the discourse of corruption varies a great deal from one country to another, dependent as it is on particular historical trajectories and the specific grammars of public culture. Taking the international context of nation states into account, however, brings their substantial similarities into sharp relief. 66 In order that a state may legitimately represent a nation in the international system of nation state, it has to conform at least minimally to the requirements of a modern nation state. The tension between legitimacy in the interstate system and autonomy and sovereignty is intensifying for nation states with the continued movement toward an increasingly transnational public sphere. The accelerating circulation of cultural products —television and radio programmes, news, films, videos, audio recordings, books, fashions—has been predicated on gigantic shifts in multinational capital. When this is tied to the reduction of trade barriers, the worldwide debt crisis (specially visible in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe), offshore production, and the restructuring of markets (exemplified by the European Union), a pattern of extensive criss-crossing emerges (Appadurai 1990). These complex cultural and ideological interconnections reveal that discourses of corruption (and hence of accountability) are from the very

beginning articulated in a field formed by the intersection of many different transnational forces. In short, to understand how discourses of corruption symbolically construct ‘the state’, we must inspect phenomena whose boundaries do not coincide with those of the nation state. At the same time, however, these discourses do not operate homogeneously across the world. Rather, they articulate with distinctive historical trajectories to form unique hybridizations and creolizations in different settings (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). The fourth significant point, which attends to the historical and cultural specificity of constructions of the state, has to do with vigilance towards the imperialism of the Western conceptual apparatus. Rather than begin with the notions of state and civil society that were forged on the anvil of European history, I focus on the modalities that enable the state (and, simultaneously, that which is not the state) to be discursively constructed. Looking at everyday practices, including practices of representation, and the representations of (state) practice in public culture, helps us arrive at a historically specific and ideologically constructed understanding of ‘the state’. Such an analysis simultaneously considers those other groupings and institutions that are imagined in the processes of contestation, negotiation, and collaboration with ‘the state.’ There is no reason to assume that there is, or should be, a unitary entity that stands apart from, and in opposition to ‘the state’, one that is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of the social space. What I have tried to emphasize in this article is that the very same processes that enable one to construct the state also help one to imagine these other social groupings—citizens, communities (Chatterjee 1990), social groups (Bourdieu 1985), coalitions, classes, interest groups, civil society, polity, ethnic groups, subnational groups, political parties, trade unions, and farmers organizations. For the purposes of my argument, assembling these groups into some overarching relation was unnecessary. I, therefore, did not employ the notion of ‘civil society’, which usually fills such a need, in this analysis of the discourses of corruption in India. Furthermore, it is not a concept indigenously invoked in the various processes of imagining identity that I have described here. 67 The final question that this article addresses concerns political action and activism, concerns that should be included in the field of applied anthropology. In the context of the state, the collaboration/resistance dichotomy is unhelpful in thinking of strategies for political struggle. The

reason is that such a gross bifurcation does not allow one to take advantage of the fact that the state is a formation that, as Stuart Hall puts it, ‘condenses’ contradictions (Hall 1981,1986a, 1986b). It also hides from view the fact that there is no position strictly outside or inside the state, because what is being contested is the terrain of the ideological field. Any struggle against currently hegemonic configurations of power and domination involves a cultural struggle, what Gramsci has called the ‘war of position’. What is at stake is nothing less than a transformation in the manner in which the state comes to be constructed. It is a struggle that problematizes the historical divide between those who choose to do political work ‘within’ the state and those who work ‘outside’ it, because the cultural construction of the state in public culture can result from, and affect, both in equal measure. By pointing out that advocates of applied work and those who favour activist intervention may sometimes unintentionally share a common project of reifying ‘the state’ and then locating themselves with respect to that totality (the one inside, the other outside), I neither intend to equate different modes of engagement nor to belittle the often politically sophisticated understandings that practitioners bring to their activities. All I wish to emphasize is that one's theory of ‘the state’ does greatly matter in formulating strategies for political action. Just as Gramsci's notion of hegemony led him to believe that 1917 may have been the last European example of vanguardism (what he called the ‘war of manoeuvre’), so my analysis of ‘the state’ leads to the conclusion that we can attempt to exploit the contradictory processes that go into constituting ‘it’. These contradictions not only address the divergent pulls exerted by the multiple agencies, departments, organizations, levels, and agendas of ‘the state’ but also the contested terrain of public representation. If it is precisely in the practices of historical narrative and statistical abstraction, in equal parts thin fiction and brute fact, that the phenomenon of state fetishism emerges, we must remember how unstable and fragile this self-representation is and how it could always be otherwise . For example, I have shown how the discourse of corruption helps construct ‘the state’, yet at the same time it can potentially empower citizens by marking those activities that infringe on their rights. One way to think about strategies of political action, about such dichotomies as applied/activist, inside/outside, policy analysis/class

struggle, and developmentalism/revolution, is to draw an initial distinction between entitlement and empowerment 68 The ‘machinery’ of development, with its elaborate yet repetitive logic, focuses on the goal of delivering entitlements. As Ferguson (1990) has argued, it does so in fact only to remove all discussion of empowerment from the discursive horizon (hence the title of his book, The Anti-Politics Machine) . Yet the two are not mutually exclusive. And it is here that seizing on the fissures and ruptures, the contradictions in the policies, programmes, institutions, and discourses of ‘the state’ allows people to create possibilities for political action and activism. 69 I see critical reflection on the discourse of development as a point of departure for political action, not as a moment of arrival. Even as we begin to see that we need, as Arturo Escobar (1992) has felicitously put it, alternatives to development , and not development alternatives , we must learn not to scoff at a plebeian politics of opportunism, strategies that are alive to the conjunctural possibilities of the moment. Keynes served to remind economists and Utopians that ‘in the long run we are all dead’. 70 The poor, I might add, live only half as long.

Notes 1 . I am grateful to Purnima Mankekar, James Ferguson, David Nugent, Don Moore, Lata Mani, Jane Collier, John Peters, Elizabeth Perry, Atul Kohli, and three anonymous reviewers for detailed comments. This article was originally presented at a workshop on ‘State-Society Relations’ at the University of Texas (USA) at Austin, 8–11 February 1990. It has benefited from the critical comments of participants of the SSRC/ACLS Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East's ‘Vocabularies of the State’ workshop in Hanover, NH, 24–25 March 1990. I am also grateful for the input received from seminar participants at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for International Studies and the Anthropology Colloquium at the University of California, Irvine. Many interesting questions were raised at presentations at Stanford University, (12 October 1992), Columbia University (8 February 1993) and the University of Pennsylvania (22 February 1993), some of which will have to await the development of a much longer manuscript. I am grateful to the Fritz Endowment of the School of International Studies, University of Washington, and to Fulbright-Hays for supporting fieldwork in the summer of 1989 and the 1991–92 academic year, respectively. 2 . Instead of adopting the cumbersome technique of putting ‘the state’ in quotation marks throughout the text, I will henceforth omit quotation marks except at points where I want to draw attention explicitly to the reified nature of the object denoted by that term. 3 . Similar questions were raised earlier by Nader (1972: 306–307). 4 . Such an analysis has important implications for political action, as it suggests that the struggle for hegemony is built into the construction of the state. It rejects the reification

of the state inherent both in vanguardist movements that seek to overthrow ‘it’, and reformist movements that seek to work within ‘it’. 5 . Herzfeld remarks: ‘Thus anthropology, with its propensity to focus on the exotic and the remarkable, has largely ignored the practices of bureaucracy…. Yet this silence is, as Handelman has observed, a remarkable omission’ (1992a: 45). Handelman's work (1978, 1981) develops a call made by scholars such as Nader (1972) to ‘study up’, and attempts to do for bureaucracies what ethnographers such as Rohlen (1974, 1983) have done for other institutions such as banks and schools. 6 . It should be obvious that I am making a distinction between an empiricist epistemology and empirical methods . I am definitely not saying that empirical research needs to be abandoned. 7 . The larger project has a significant oral, historical and archival dimension as well as a wider sampling of the various media. See also Mbembe's (1992) wonderful article for its suggestive use of newspaper reports. 8 . See the articles by Mitchell (1989) and Taussig (1992) on this matter. 9 . Handler's work (1985) very nicely demonstrates how these struggles work out in the case of objects that the regional government of Quebec wants to designate as the region's patrimoine . 10 . The scandal, which came to be known as the Bofors Affair, involved an alleged kickback in a gun ordered by the Indian government from a Swedish manufacturer. What gave the scandal such prominence is that it was widely believed that the kickback went to highly placed members of the government and the Congress party, perhaps even the prime minister. Naturally, the ruling party did not pursue the investigation with great enthusiasm, and no concrete proof was ever uncovered. 11 . The phrase is Lata Mani's (1989). 12 . Michael Woost's (1993) fine essay also addresses similar questions. 13 . The term ‘Third World’ encapsulates and homogenizes what are, in fact, diverse and heterogeneous realities (Mohanty 1988). It implies further that ‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds exist as separate and separable spaces (Ahmad 1987). I will thus capitalize it to highlight its problematic status. In a similar manner, ‘the West’ is obviously not a homogeneous and unified entity. I use it to refer to the effects of hegemonic representations of the West rather than its subjugated traditions. I, therefore, use the term simply to refer, not to a geographical space, but to a particular historical conjuncture of place, power, and knowledge. 14 . A phenomenon that Johannes Fabian (1983) calls ‘allochronism’. 15 . This point has been made by Partha Chatterjee (1990) in response to Charles Taylor (1990); his book (1993) restates it and develops the argument further. 16 . I am grateful to Dipesh Chakrabarty for first bringing this to my attention. See the excellent concluding chapter of his monograph of the working class in Bengal (1989), in which he tackles this question head on. 17 . The headman is an official elected by all the registered voters of a village. Political parties rarely participate in village elections in the sense that candidates do not represent national or regional parties when contesting these elections. Headmen are neither considered part of the administration nor the grass-roots embodiment of political parties,

although they may play important roles in representing the village to bureaucratic and party institutions. 18 . Like all the other names in this article, this too is a pseudonym. In addition, owing to the sensitive nature of this material, the identities and occupations of all the people mentioned here have been altered beyond recognition. 19 . Since the word ‘federal’ is rarely used in India, I will refer to it by its Indian equivalent, that is, ‘central’. 20 . I use the term ‘hold court’ because Sharma ji 's mode of operation is reminiscent of an Indian durbar, a royal court. 21 . At the exchange rate prevailing at the time of the incident in 1989 ($ 1 = Rs 18), the client in effect handed Verma the equivalent of 56 cents. That figure is misleading, however, since it does not indicate purchasing power. Ten rupees would be enough to buy a hearty non-vegetarian lunch at a roadside restaurant for one person or one kilogram of high-quality mangoes, but not enough for a pair of rubber slippers. 22 . I find Judith Butler's (1990) concept of gender as performance very useful in thinking about this issue, particularly as it emphasizes that the agents involved are not following a cultural script governed by rule-following behaviour. I am grateful to Don Moore for emphasizing this point to me. 23 . This level was defined as Rs 6,400 (approximately $215) per year for the 1992–93 fiscal year. 24 . The village development worker is a functionary of the regional government who is responsible for the implementation of ‘development programmes’ in a small circle of villages, the number in the circle varying from three to a dozen depending on their populations. Like other government officials, the village development worker is subject to frequent transfer, at least once every three years. 25 . Sripal claimed to know the exact amount by consulting ‘people who can read and write’. The officials at the block office told me, however, that a sum of Rs 8,000 was allocated for such projects. 26 . I later learned that Rs 3,000 of the total cost is given as a loan that has to be paid back in twenty instalments stretching across ten years. 27 . To have explored the implications of the full chain of mediations for each ethnographic example would have taken the article far afield in too many different directions and made it lose its focus. This is a task that I propose to undertake in a fulllength monograph. Here, I wanted to stress that we not forget that the detailed analysis of everyday life is overdetermined by transnational influences. 28 . I would like to thank Joel Migdal for pointing this out to me. 29 . The symbolic representation of the state is as yet largely unexplored territory, with a few notable exceptions. Bernard Cohn, for instance, has demonstrated how the Imperial Assemblage of 1877 enabled the British colonial state to represent its authority over India at the same time as it made ‘manifest and compelling the [colonial] sociology of India’ (1987b: 658). See also Nicholas Dirks’ study of a small, independent state in precolonial and colonial South India (1987). 30 . I have deliberately avoided use of the term ‘public sphere’ in this article. As Habermas (1989 [1962]) makes clear, the ‘public sphere’ is the space where civil society emerges with the rise of bourgeois social formations. It is there that critical, rational debate

among bourgeois subjects could take place about a variety of topics, including the state, and it is there that checks on state power emerge through the force of literate public opinion (Peters 1993). Since the argument that follows raises doubts about the wholesale import of these categories to the particular context being analysed, this notion of the ‘public sphere’ is not particularly helpful. I should hasten to add that I am by no means implying that ‘the West’ is unique in possessing a space for public debate and discussion. The notion of the public sphere, however, denotes a particular historical and cultural formation shaped by feudalism, kingly rule, the rise of capitalism, the importance of urban centres, and the dominant role of the church as an institution that is not replicated in the same form elsewhere in the world. 31 . For those unfamiliar with the Indian context, it might be useful to point out that the reason why I am concentrating on newspapers is that whereas radio and television are strictly controlled by the government, the press is relatively autonomous and frequently critical of ‘the state’. The only other important source of news in rural areas, transnational radio, remains limited in its coverage of India in that it remains focused on major stories and hence lacks the detail and specificity of newspaper accounts. 32 . This is not to imply that anthropologists have not incorporated newspapers into their analysis in the past. See, for example, Benedict (1946). Herzfeld explains the marginal role of newspapers very clearly: ‘Journalism is treated as not authentically ethnographic, since it is both externally derived and rhetorically factual…. In consequence, the intrusion of media language into village discourse has largely been ignored’ (1992b: 94). Herzfeld makes a strong case for close scrutiny of newspapers even when the unit of analysis is ‘the village’; others such as Anderson (1983) and Mbembe (1992) have stressed the theoretical importance of newspapers in the construction of the nation and for the analysis of ‘the state’, respectively. 33 . This analysis of newspapers looks at connections between local and transnational discourses of corruption, but not at the links between transnational capital and local newspapers. For example, although none of the locally distributed newspapers (Englishlanguage or vernacular) are even partially owned by transnational corporations—many of them depend on multinational wire service bureaus for international news. A detailed study would also have to account for the complex relationship between domestic and international capital accumulation. Further, the connection between the ownership and content of newspapers is an incredibly difficult one to establish, and is quite beyond the scope of this article and the competence of the author. I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising these stimulating questions. 34 . Herzfeld has issued a warning that we would do well to heed: ‘We cannot usefully make any hard-and-fast distinctions between rural and urban, illiterate and learned (or at least journalistic), local and national. These terms—urbanity, literacy, the national interest, and their antonyms—appear in the villagers’ discourse, and they are part of that discourse…the larger discourses about Greece's place in the world both feed and draw nourishment from the opinions expressed in the tiniest village’ (1992b: 117). ‘Attacking ‘the state’ and ‘bureaucracy’ (often further reified as ‘the system’) is a tactic of social life, not an analytical strategy. Failure to recognize this is to essentialize essentialism. Ethnographically, it would lead us to ignore the multiplicity of sins covered by the monolithic stereotypes of ‘the bureaucracy’ and ‘the state’ (1992a: 45).

35 . Although literacy rates are relatively low throughout the region, the impact of newspapers goes far beyond the literate population, as news reports are orally transmitted across a wide range of groups. Political news on state-run television (Doordarshan), by contrast, is met with a high degree of scepticism, because everyone concerned knows that it is the mouthpiece of the government. 36 . India Today is published in a number of Indian languages and has a large audience in small towns and villages. Corruption also figures prominently in the vernacular press, and in what follows, I will compare the coverage there with magazines such as India Today . 37 . At exchange rates prevailing then, Rs 64 crore = $36 million. Therefore, 64 paise was equal to 3.6 cents, less than the cost of a cup of tea. 38 . The programme in question is the Integrated Rural Development Programme. 39 . This fact should dispel the myth that the discourse of corruption is to be found only among the urban middle class of ‘Westernized’ Indians. 40 . ‘To warm one's pockets’ is a metaphor for taking a bribe. I have translated all the titles from the Hindi original. 41 . The sweet in question is a regionally famous one— pedas , from Mathura. 42 . It would perhaps be more accurate to talk of ‘subject-positions’ rather than ‘subjects’ here. 43 . In this article, my analysis is limited to Hindi newspapers that publish local news of the Mandi region. 44 . An excellent study of the importance of rumour in the countryside is to be found in Amin (1984). A fuller analysis would draw on the role of radio and television (both state-controlled) in all of this. 45 . It is in this sense of violation of norms that the term is often extended to moral life quite removed from ‘the state’, to mean debasement, dishonesty, immorality, vice, impurity, decay, and contamination. The literature on corruption has been bedevilled by the effort to find a set of culturally universal, invariable norms that would help decide if certain actions are to be classified as ‘corrupt’. This foundational enterprise soon degenerated into ethnocentrism and dogma, leading to a prolonged period of intellectual inactivity. Of course, not all the contributions to the corruption literature fell into this ethnocentric trap; some quite explicitly set out to undermine the assumptions of modernization theory. The only reason I have chosen not to spend too much space here discussing the corruption literature is that it has very little to say about the chief concerns of my article, namely, the ethnographic analysis of the everyday functioning of the state and the discursive construction of the state in public culture. The only exception is to be found in the series of studies by Wade (1982,1984, 1985), which ethnographically describe corruption through observation and interviews with state officials. A representative sample of the different viewpoints in the corruption literature can be obtained from Clarke (1983); Heidenheimer (1970); Huntington (1968); Leff (1964); Leys (1965); Monteiro (1970); Scott (1969), (1972); Tilman (1968); and Klitgaard (1988). 46 . I am grateful to Lata Mani for stressing this point to me. 47 . For example, a highly placed official who fails to help a close relative or fellow villager obtain a government position is often roundly criticized by people for not

fulfilling his obligations to his kinsmen and village brothers. On the other hand, the same people often roundly condemn any official of another caste or village who has done precisely that as being ‘corrupt’ and as guilty of encouraging ‘nepotism’. 48 . The modernism of the post-colonial nation state is exemplified by the concept of citizenship enshrined in the Indian Constitution, a notion clearly rooted in Enlightenment ideas about the individual. My use of the term ‘citizens’ might seem to hark back to a notion of ‘civil society’ that I argue against in the rest of the article. What I am attempting to stress here, however, is that in a post-colonial context the notion of citizenship does not arise out of the bourgeois public sphere, but out of the discourses and practices of the modern nation state. Citizenship is therefore a hybridized subjectposition that has very different resonances in a post-colonial context than it does in places where it is inextricably blended with the emergence of ‘civil society’. 49 . The discourse of accountability opened up by the rhetoric of citizenship need not become politically significant. Whether it does or not has to do with the level of organization of different groups that are affected by it. 50 . Interestingly enough, although the rhetoric of the Kisan Union predicates its opposition to the state in terms of the state's anti-farmer policies, most of its grass-roots protests are organized around local instances of corruption. The behaviour of corrupt officials then becomes further evidence of the state's exploitation of farmers. Except at the very lowest levels, all officials have jobs in which they are transferred frequently. Although the circle in which they can be transferred varies by rank, in a state as large as Uttar Pradesh, what Anderson (1983) has termed ‘bureaucratic pilgrimages’ usually cover quite an extensive area. Officials cannot be posted to their ‘home’ village, block, tehsil, or district (depending on their circle of responsibility). 51 . If one were to analyse the discourse of corruption in a region where dominant landed groups and lower levels of the state were more overtly complicit (as, for example, in certain regions of Bihar), one would probably find that it attains a very different texture. 52 . The vidhan sabha is the state legislative assembly, and the Lok Sabha Parliament's (lower) House of the People. 53 . At the time this interview took place, Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister of India. 54 . One lakh = 100,000. At the time of the interview, Rs 1 lakh were approximately equal to $6,000. 55 . I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this important question. 56 . Other peasants who believe that lower, but not upper, levels of government are corrupt may not hold that belief for the same reasons as Ram Singh. 57 . All government positions have reservations or quotas for the Scheduled Castes—a certain percentage of jobs at any given rank are kept aside for people from the lowest castes. 58 . Sometimes the word shaasan , which is closer to ‘administration’, is also employed. 59 . I am by no means implying that the viewing of television explains why Ram Singh holds this opinion of the corrupt middle levels of the state. He may very well believe in it for other reasons as well. Television, however, seems to have influenced his views on this matter: ‘We get a little more worldly.’ 60 . His reference to ‘illiteracy’ must not be taken literally.

61 . This point has been emphasized by Herzfeld in his discussion of the Greek village of Glendi and the provincial town of Rethemnos: ‘There has never been any serious doubt about the importance of the media in connecting villagers with larger national and international events. Like the folklore of earlier times, the media spawn an extraordinarily homogeneous as well as pervasive set of political cliches. Much less well-explored, however is how this discourse is manipulated' (1992b: 99; emphasis in original). Talk of manipulation sometimes seems to make it appear as if there is a ‘deep’ intention working towards particular goals; I prefer to think of employability, the diverse ways in which such discourse can be used in different circumstances. 62 . It is not surprising that Ram Singh, like other people, neither occupies a space of pure oppositionality to dominant discourses and practices, nor is simply duped by them. Maddox (1990) suggests that scholars may have their own reasons for looking so hard for resistance. Forms of unambiguous resistance are rare indeed, as Foucault recognized (1980: 109–45), and the simultaneity of co-optation and resistance baffles the familiar antinomies of analytical thought (Abu-Lughod 1990; Mankekar 1993). Indeed, the effort to show resistance even in overt gestures of deference requires the positing of hyperstrategic rational actors, an analytical strategy that is of dubious value. 63 . It might be objected that this kind of statement involves an analytical circularity: constructions of the state are contextual and situated; yet any attempt to define context and situation involves the use of discourses that may themselves have been shaped by constructions of the state, among other things. Following Foucault, and specially Haraway (1988), I want to argue that the search to escape the mutual determination of larger socio-political context and discursive positions is untenable. The analyst, too, is part of this discursive formation and cannot hope to arrive at a description of ‘situatedness’ that stands above, beyond, or apart from the context being analysed. This is precisely what ‘scientific’ discourses seek to achieve—a universally verifiable description that is independent of observer and context. Haraway brilliantly undermines the claims of objectivity embodied in these discourses by showing that ‘the view from nowhere’, or what she calls the ‘god-trick’, masks a will-to-power that constitutes its own political project. She argues that all claims to objectivity are partial perspectives, context-dependent, and discursively embedded visions that are not for that reason unimportant or unredeemable. In other words, the recognition that the truths of scientific discourse are themselves located within specific webs of power-laden interconnections does not signal a slide toward ‘anything goes’ randomness where all positions are subjectively determined and hence irrefutable (see also Bernstein 1985). My effort to describe Ram Singh's position according to class, caste, gender and age hierarchies flows out of a social scientific discourse and a sense of political engagement as a post-colonial subject in which inequality, poverty and power are the central concerns. I doubt if an upper-caste villager would describe Ram Singh in this way, neither in all likelihood would a government official, nor would an official of the World Bank. While being a particular description, it is, I would argue, anything but an arbitrary one. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for forcing me to clarify this point. 64 . Frustrated with the reification of the state and convinced that it was just a source of mystification, Radcliffe-Brown (1940: xxiii) argued that the state be eliminated from social analysis! One of the most thoughtful discussions on this topic is to be found in Abrams (1988).

65 . Richard Fox's fine study of the colonial state in Punjab demonstrates the mutual construction of Sikh identities and ‘the state’. He stresses that ‘the state’ is ‘not a “thing” but a “happening”’ (1985: 156), and that it is driven by internal contradictions, incomplete consciousness of interests, incorrect implementation of projects aimed at furthering its interests, and conflict between individual officials and the organization (ibid.: 157). 66 . Anderson points to the similarity of nation states by emphasizing the ‘modularity of ‘the last wave’ of nationalism (1983: 104–28), and Chatterjee (1986) stresses the ‘derivative’ character of Third World nationalisms. 67 . I am not defending the naive possibility of ‘indigenous’ theory, for it is not clear to me what such a concept could possibly mean in the era of post-colonialism and late capitalism. Instead, I am arguing that the use of concepts that originate in ‘the West’ to understand the specificity of the Indian context enables one to develop a critique of the analytical apparatus itself (Chakrabarty 1991). Jim Ferguson (personal communication, 8 July 1992) reminds me that even in the United States, the notion of ‘civil society’ has very little purchase outside academic circles. 68 . Amartya Sen's study of famines (1982) employs a theory of entitlements to explain who suffers in a famine and why. See also Appadurai (1984). 69 . It should be clear that I am not suggesting that it is only here that possibilities for intervention exist. 70 . The source is A Tract on Monetary Reform (Keynes 1971 [1923]).

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About the Editor and Contributors Editor Zoya Hasan is Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Contributors Pranab Bardhan is Professor at the Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, USA. Jan Breman is at the Centre for Asian Studies, University of Amsterdam. Partha Chatterjee is Professor and Director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Francine R. Frankel is Professor of Political Science and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Akhil Gupta is Professor at the University of Stanford. Sudipta Kaviraj teaches at the Department of Political Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. Atul Kohli is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Rajni Kothari is Chairman, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.. Ashis Nandy is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Prabhat Patnaik is Professor at the Centre for Economics and Studies in Politics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. D. L. Sheth is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.

Achin Vanaik is a journalist and formerly Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, Surat, Gujarat and also formerly Visiting Professor at Jamia Millia lslamia, Delhi.

Index Keywords Aaj , 351-53 Abrams, Philip, 333 accumulation: and legitimation, 126–30 Advani, L.K., 280 affirmative action: crisis of, 264–66 Agarwal, Bina, 269 Agnes, Flavia, 287 Ahmed, Nazir, 117 Ahmed, Rashmee, 354 Ajmera, Amin Chand, 351 Akali Dal, 22 , 243 Akbar, 69 Alavi, Hamza, 89 Ali, M. Athar, 40 All India Democratic Women's Association, 285 Amar Ujala , 351 Ambedkar, Babasaheb, 66 Anagnost, Ann, 333 Anti-Politics Machine, The , 365 Appadurai, Arjun, 334 , 348 , 362 Aquino, Cory, 208 Arthashastra , 80 Asad, Talal, 278 Ashforth, Adam, 333 Ashoka, 69 Aston, T.S., 127 Austin, Granville, 16 , 46 Bacchetta, Paula, 280 Bachchan, Amitabh, 84 backward classes: struggle for political and state power, 237-45 Backward Classes Commission, 242 , 246 . See also , Mandal Commission backwardness: concept of, 256–59 Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), 241–42 Baird, Robert, 271 , 277

Banatwala, G.M., 274 Banerjee, Ashis, 17 Bardhan, Pranab, 14 , 31 , 92–99 , 135 , 137 , 158 Basu, Amrita, 270 , 282 Basu, Jyoti, 80 Basu, Kaushik, 23 Bayly, C.A., 41 Benedict, Ruth, 334 Béteille, André, 96 , 286 Bhaduri, Amit, 24-25 Bhagwati, J., 14 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 23 , 26 , 240 , 242-43 , 271 , 280-81 , 286 Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), 337 , 345–47 , 355 , 362 Bismarck, 67 Bombay Plan, 142-43 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 117 Bourdieu, Pierre, 333 , 363 Brass, Paul, 22 , 210 Breckenridge, Carol A., 348 Breman, Jan, 31 , 293 , 295 , 315 Brow, James, 333 , 335 Byzantine system, 53 Calhoun, Craig, 335 capitalism, 147-48 capitalist industrialization, 127–29 caste system, 40 centralization thrust: and decentralization, 202–3 ; and powerlessness, 206-8 , 217–19 ; and tendency towards, 209–17 Chakravarty, Sukhomoy, 17–18 , 123–26 , 129-30 , 132 Chandrasekhar, C.P., 100 Charan Singh, 81 , 240 , 355 Chatterjee, Partha, 15 , 28 , 31 , 115 , 131 , 138 , 363 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra, 73 , 75 Chaudhuri, Ajit, 131 Chawla, Prabhu, 350 Chopra, Romi, 83 citizen, nature of, 86 civil society, 131 Cohn, Bernard S., 44 , 333

colonial state, 43-45 , 89 Communist Party of India, 212 , 242 , 280 Communist Party of India-Marxist, 220–21 , 242 , 244 , 280 community, state and gender concepts, 286-88 Congress Party, 19–4 , 209–15 , 220–23 , 236–37 , 240–41 , 276–81 , 314 ; culture of, 236–37 ; policies of, 19–24 ; power challenges to, 211-14 Constitution of India: article, 30 , 280 ; article, 370 , 280 Coombe, Rosemary J., 354 Cornwallis, 122 corruption: discourse of in public culture, 348-56 ; state and, 331–32 , 336 ; system of, 98 , 347–48 Cossman, Brenda, 281-82 Criminal Tribes Act of 1952, 260 Currie, Bob, 24 Dainik Jagran , 351 Darji, Jinabhai, 322 De Tocqueville, Alexis, 168 democracy: and development in plural society, 179–88 ; and freedom, 85–87 ; centralized and per-sonalistic rule, 208–28 ; economic liberalization of Rajiv Gandhi and, 222–26 ; in India, 208–28 ; poverty allevation programme of Indira Gandhi and, 219–21 ; tendency towards, centralization and, 206–17 , 226–28 ; —, powerlessness and, 206–8 , 217–19 , 226–28 Desai, M., 249 Deutsch, Karl, 214 , 216 development: and democracy in plural societies, 179–88 ; Indian model of, 189 dominance and state power, 233–35 , 241–45 ; restructuring relations, 241–45 dominant coalition, 92–103 dominant elite: changing terms of, 246–47 ; nationalism and, 252–56 ; perspective of, 252– 56 ; policy of discourse, 256–59 ; reservation and, 252–56 ; secularization and, 252–56 ; terms of discourse of, 247–52 Doornbos, Martin, 27 Dubey, V.S., 117 economic liberalization: during Rajiv Gandhi, 222–27 economy of India: corruption and, 169–70 ; development and, 142–55 ; drift towards backward and lower castes, 168–71 ; liberalization in, 149–54 , 160 , 162 , 222–27 ; political economy of reform, 158–71 ; reforms in 158–71 electoral policies: communalization of, 187 elite accommodation, politics of, 237–38 Embree, Ainslee, 23 Escobar, Arturo, 344 , 365

ethnography: of state, 332-65 Evans, Peter B., 333 Faleiro, Eduardo, 276 federalism, concept of, 255–56 Ferguson, James, 334 , 344 , 363 , 365 Fernandes, George, 81 finance capital, 150-51 Finance Commission, 166 Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), 234 forward castes-backward classes conflicts, 238–40 , 244–45 Frankel, Francine, 13–14 , 17 , 19 , 26 , 31 , 47 , 233 freedom: and democracy, 85–87 ; concept of, 128 French Revolution, 86 Fromm, Erich, 83 Gandhi, Indira, 18 , 20–22 , 55 , 77–78 , 80–81 , 99 , 199-200 , 210-14 , 219–23 , 225 , 248 ; poverty alleviation programme, 219–21 Gandhi, M.K., 46 , 68–69 , 75 , 117–19 , 170 , 199–201 , 234 , 236 Gandhi, Rajiv, 22–23 , 78–80 , 83–84 , 86 , 99 , 211 , 222–27 , 241 , 244 , 277 , 282 , 348 , 350 , 358-60 ; economic liberalization programme, 222–24 Ganguly, Sumit, 23 Garcia, 208 Garibi Hatao (Alleviate Poverty) slogan, 13 , 22 , 219–21 , 248 Gaulle, Charles de, 86 Gellner, 56 Gemeinschaft concept, 38 gender: justice, 283–86 ; relations, 269–70 ; state and community, 286–88 George V, 75 Gesellschaft concept, 38 Ghosh, J.C., 117 Gilroy, Paul, 348 Government Labour Officer (GLO), 293–306 ; action taken under Minimum Wage legislation, 304–6 ; conflicts and, 320–26 ; control among landless, 296–99 ; law enforcing officer, 303–9 ; visit to farmers, 300–303 Gram Majur Kalyan Kendra (Rural Workers’ Welfare Centre), 316 Gramsci, Antonio, 130 , 215 , 364 Green Revolution, 19 Gujarat Mitr , 326 Gujarat Samachar , 326 Gupta, Akhil, 31 , 331 , 334 , 363

Gurevitch, Michael, 348 Hacking, Ian, 360 Hall, Stuart, 348 , 364 Halpati Seva Sangh (HSS), 314–15 Handelman, Don, 333 Hannerz, Ulf, 334 Hansen, Thomas, 24 Haque, Israrul, 278 Haraway, Donna, 360 Harvey, David, 335 Hasan, Zoya, 13 , 22–23 , 26 , 31 , 269–70 , 276 , 285 Hee, Park Chung, 218 Hegde, Ramakrishna, 80 Hegel, 121–22 Herzfeld, Michael, 333–34 , 354 Hilferding, 150 Hindu Code Bill, 287 Hindustan , 351 Hirachand, Walchand, 117 Hobson, 150 Huntington, Samuel, 208 ideal society, concept of, 67 imagined state, 356-61 India: as modern state, 188–203 ; centralized and personalistic rule in, 208–28 ; democacy in, 206–28 ; dominance and state power, 233–35 , 241–45 ; economic liberalization, 222–26 ; OBC’s reservation, 246–66 ; political institutions, 235–37 ; poverty alleviation programme, 219–21 ; rise of backward classes, 237–45 ; social order, decline in, 233–45 ; state power in independent India, 233–45 ; state-society relationship, 18–20 , 72–76 , 208–28 ; struggle for political and state power in, 237–45 ; tendencies towards, centralization, 206–17 , 226–28 ; powerlessness, 206–8 , 217–19 , 226–28 India as modern state: case study of, 188–203 ; challenge from bottom, 194–95 ; Congress system, 190–92 ; crisis of institutions, 198–200 ; crisis of values, 200–201 ; development model, 188–90 ; erosion and decline, 194 ; legacy from pre-modern period, 192–94 ; moral dimensions, 201–3 ; one-party dominance state, 191–92 ; opposition in, 197–98 ; response from top, 195–97 India Today , 350–51 Indian Express, The , 83 Indian politics: culture of, 77–85 Indian state: consequences of change, 74–76 ; democracy and freedom, 85–87 ; development ideology, 120–23 ; development planning and, 115–40 ; dominance and power, 233–35 ; dominant coalition, 92–103 ; economic allocation of resources, 133–35

; New Economic Policy (NEP) and, 103–7 ; perspective on politics and, 27–31 ; political culture of, 27–31 , 61–87 ; political institutions of, 235–37 ; politics, 77–85 ; rationality of, 120–23 ; social character, 89–107 ; society-state relationship, 72–76 ; traditional vs. nation state, 66–77 Industrial Disputes Act 1977, 163 Industrial Revolution, 119 , 128 industrialization, 127–33 , 154–55 Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), 320 intermediate regime: concept of, 90 internal export-led industrialization, 154 international development strategy, 184 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 104 , 149 , 335 , 344 Iqbal, Muhammad, 75 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 24 Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front, 243 Janata Dal, 24–44 , 247 , 280 Janata Party, 21 , 196–97 Jansatta , 351 Jayal, Niraja Gopal, 13 , 284–86 Jayaswal, K.P., 66 Jeffrey, Robin, 22 Jenkins, R.S., 159 , 162 , 164 Joshi, N.M., 117 Joshi, Sharad, 106 Joshi, Vijay, 24 KHAM (Koli-Kshatriya Harijans, Adivasis, and Muslims) alliance, 239 Kalecki, M., 90 , 152 Kapur, Ratna, 181–82 Karunanidhi, K., 85 Kasaba, Resat, 333 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 15 , 21 , 27 , 31 , 43 , 57 Keynes, J.M., 143 , 365 Khan, Arif Mohammad, 273 Khan, Syed Ahmed, 273 Khedut Samaj, 314 , 325 Khilnani, Sunil, 18 Kissinger, Henry, 86 Kligman, Gail, 356 Kochanek, Stanley, 21

Kohli, Atul, 13–14 , 22 , 26–27 , 31 , 138 , 206 , 208 , 211 , 220 , 251 Kothari, Rajni, 12 , 22 , 27 , 31 , 48 , 177 , 257 Krishna, Raj, 99 Kumarappa, J.C., 117–19 Kurian, K.M., 15 land and forest resources: recolonization of, 186 landless labourer: control over, 296–99 legitimation: accumulation and, 126–30 ; ambiguities of, 136–40 Lenin, 150 , 155 , 199 liberal state, 44 liberalization, 149–54 , 160 , 162 licence-permit-quota raj, 97 , 105 Limaye, Madhu, 81 , 261 local government institutions: villagers’ encounters with, 332–65 Lohia, 170 Lok Dal, 240 , 242 low-income democracies, 207 , 217 , 220–21 MAJGAR (Muslims, Ahirs, Jats, Gujjars, Rajputs and other backward castes) alliance, 241 Machiavelli, Niccollo, 158 Mandal, B.P., 242 Mandal Commission, 23 , 247–48 , 251–52 , 259–65 ; elite response to report of, 247–48 ; state governments and, 259–64 Mandel, Ernest, 335 Mansfield, John, 285 Mao, 199 Marx, Karl, 42 , 127 mass media: discourse on corruption, 350–55 Maurya, Chandragupta, 69 Michelina, Jose A. Silva, 184 middle class, 90–92 , 96 , 97 , 100 , 170 , 185 , 244 Migdal, Joel, 208 Miliband, 93 minority rights, and personal law, 271–73 Mitchell, T., 37 , 333 Mitra, Chandan, 354 modern nation state, 45–59 modern state, 37–59 , 68 , 177–203 Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act (MRTP), 234 Morris-Jones, W.H., 12 , 193

Mukherjee, Radhakamal, 117 Multi-National Corporations (MNCs), 149–50 , 154 Muslim Personal Law, 252 , 255 , 270 , 272–74 , 276 , 278–79 Muslim Personal Law Board, 275–76 Muslim women, and majoritarian discourse, 279–82 Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill, 1996, 270 , 274–79 , 285 Muslim Women’s Bill, 31 Myrdal, Gunnar, 13 Nagaraj, R., 159 Nanda, Arun, 83 Nandy, Ashis, 31 , 61 , 75 , 332 Nanjundaswamy, 106 Narasimha Rao, 103 Narayan, J.P., 80 nation state, 45–59 , 66–70 ; nationalism and, 72-76 National Front (NF), 247 National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, 164 national language, 69–71 National Planning Committee (NPC), 117–19 National Policy on English Language, 251–52 , 255 nationalism: and nation state, 72–76 ; elite perspective on, 252–56 Navbharat Times , 352 Nayyar, Deepak, 24–25 Nehru, Arun, 277 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 17 , 21 , 45–46 , 49 , 55–56 , 66–67 , 117–19 , 191 , 199–200 , 209 , 272 Nehruvian state: economic policies of, 48–49 , 53–57 ; legacy of, 18 neta-babu (leader-clerk) class, 99 Nettl, J.P., 37 New Economic Policy (NEP), 103 Nugent, David, 333 official language issue, 70-71 Okin, Susan Moller, 286 Organiser , 279-80 , 282 Other Backward Classes (OBCs): case of reservation for, 246–66 Panchayati Raj system, 19 Pant, K.C., 277 , 279 Parashar, Archana, 271 , 284

Parekh, Bhiku, 286 passive revolution, strategy of, 130–33 Patel, Vallabhbhai, 66 Patnaik, Arun, 138 Patnaik, Prabhat, 15 ,17, 28 , 31 , 100 , 142 Patnaik, Utsa, 19 , 154 Peoples’ Plan, 142 personal law: and minority rights, 271–73 Philpin, C.H.E., 127 Pitroda, Sam, 83 plan implementation, 123–26 planning: accumulation and legitimation, 126–30 ; and implementation, 123–26 ; development and, 115–40 ; for planning, 116–20 ; for postcolonial state, 120–23 ; legitimation, 126–30 , 136–40 ; passive revolution strategy, 13–33 ; political economy of, 137–40 ; politics of, 126–30 , 133–35 Planning Commission, 117 , 165–66 , 234 , 237 plural societies: awakening of, 187 ; castes, 181 ; development and democracyin, 179–88 ; disaffection, separation and disintegration in, 182 ; distributive justice, 182 ; ethnicity and class issue, 180–81 ; liberal polity and, 182–83 ; multiethnic issue, 180 ; populist and plebiscitary politics, 181 ; poverty and economic development, 180 ; regional disparities, 181 ; shifts in, 184–88 Political Economy of Development in India , 92 , 158 poltical institutions: of Indian state, 235–37 politics: of state, 19–24 poor: marginalization of, 185 post-colonial state, 89–90 , 120–23 ; rationality, 120–23 potential autonomy: concept of, 92–93 Potter, D., 46 Poulantzas, Nicos, 16 , 89 , 93 poverty: alleviation slogans, 22 , 211 , 213 ; concept of, 256–59 pre-modern states, 39–42 professional class, 96–100 proprietary class, 93–96 Protection of Civil Rights Act of 1976, 260 public culture: discourse of corruption in, 348–56 Ram, Jagjivan, 82–83 Ram rajya: concept of, 69 Rama Rao, N.T., 80 , 211 Ramachandran, M.G., 85 , 211 Rainjanmabhoomi (birth place of Lord Ram)-Babri Masjid conflict, 23 , 251–52

Rao, M.S.A., 13 , 26 Rashtriya Sahara , 351 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 23 , 271 , 281 Reagan Ronald, 84–85 relative autonomy: concept of, 93 renewable natural resources: management of, 186 reservation: elite perspective on, 252–56 ; politics of, 259–64 Ritupriya, 248 Roy, A.K., 82 Roy, Rammohan, 73 Rudolph, Lloyd, 14 , 135 , 137 , 215 Rudolph, Susanne, 14 , 135 , 137 , 215 Rudra, Ashok, 92 , 94 , 96 , 100 Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP), 22 rural proletariat of South Gujarat: biased state, 326–29 ; confrontation among, 320–26 ; government in action for, 316–20 ; official mediation for, 309–15 ; state protection for, 293–329 ; unrest among, 320–26 Rural Workers’ Welfare Centre, 316 , 320 Saha.A.K., 117 Saha, Meghnad, 117 Sangari, Kumkum, 270 , 288 Sanjiva Reddy, 212 Sanyal, Kalyan K., 138 Sarabhai, Ambalal, 117 Sarkar, Tanika, 280 Sathyamurthy, T.V., 13 Savarkar, 170 secular state: community and gender, 286–88 ; gender justice and state intervention limits, 283–86 ; law, community and gender in, 269–88 ; legal reform and retreat of, 273–75 ; minority rights in, 271–73 ; Muslim women and majoritarian discourse in, 279–82 ; Muslim Women’s Bill and, 275–79 ; personal law, 271–73 ; religion and politics in, 269–88 secularism: elite perspective on, 252–56 self-reliance: strategy of, 136 Sen, Asok, 130 , 154 , 275 Sen, T.K., 164 Sethi, Harsh, 28 Shah, Ghanshyam, 19 Shah, K.T., 117 Shah Bano case, 31 , 270 , 273–75 , 278

Shahabuddin, Syed, 278 Sheth, D.L., 31 , 246 , 252–53 , 260 Shroff, A.D., 117 Singh, V.P., 80 , 241–45 , 247–48 , 350 Skinner, Q., 37 Skocpol, T., 89 , 92–93 , 333 Smith, Donald Eugene, 273 social mobilization: concept of, 214–16 Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC), 239 , 247 society: and power relationships, 178–79 ; state divergences, 18–20 ; state relationship, 18– 20 , 72–76 soft state: concept of, 13 Solanki, Madhav Singh, 221 Srinivasan, T.N., 14 Srivastava, D.K., 164 Stabilization and Structural Adjustment Programme (SSAP), 104–5 Staller, Illona, 84 : state : approaches to study of, 12–16 ; capitalism, 143 ,152; character and mode of functioning of, 49–52 ; community and gender, 286–88 ; concept of, 37–39 , 66–68 ; crisis of, 21–24 , 29–31 , 49–59 ; decline of modern state, 177–203 ; divergences in, 18– 20 ; ethnography of, 332–65 ; for unified nation, 16–17 ; Hindu concept of, 68 ; historicity of structure and formation of, 16–18 , 45–46 ; in India, 27–31 , 37–59 ; in India’s economic development, 142–55 ; in transition, 24–27 ; Indian model, 27–31 , 188–90 ; intervention limits in gender justice, 283–86 ; legal reform and retreat of, 273– 75 ; liberal approach to, 12–14 ; linguistic reorganization, 17 ; local-level functioning, 336–48 ; Marxist approach to, 15–16 , 90-92 ; modern nation state, 45–59 ; modern state, 37–59 , 68 , 177–203 ; nation state, 45–59 , 66–71 ; new conception of, 178–79 ; objectives of, 16–17 ; of colonial modernity, 43–45 ; perspectives on Indian state and politics, 27–31 ; political career of, in independent India, 11–31 ; political institutions, 235–37 ; politics of, 19–20 , 27–31 ; power and dominance in independent India, 233– 35 , 241–45 ; pre-modern states, 39–42 ; secular state, 269–88 ; social and political dynamics of, 11–16 , 61–87 , 89–107 ; social transformation and, 17 ; society relationship, 18–20 , 72–76 , 208–28 , 336 ; structure and formation of, 16–18 ; traditional vs. nation state, 66–71 statecraft: concept of, 67 subaltern classes, 15 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 23 Swarajya: Gandhian concept of, 188 Tagore, Rabindranath, 42 , 75 Taussig, Michael, 333 Telugu Desam, 280 Tenancy Act, 94

Tenekoon, N. Serena, 335 Thakurdas, Purushottamdas, 117 Third World societies: militarization of, 184 Tikait, Mahinder Singh, 106 , 355 Times of India, The , 350–51 , 354 , 356 Toennies, 38 traditional state, 66–77 transnationalization of economic activity: role of state in, 187 Tribal Sub-Plan, 320 Uniform Civil Code (UCC), 251 , 270–72 , 279 , 282 , 287 United Front, 23 Untouchability Offences Act, 1955, 260 Urla, Jacqueline, 333 Vanaik, Achin, 31 , 89 Veer, Peter van der, 23 Verma, M.P., 351 Vicziany, Marika, 29 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 23 Vishwanathan, Shiv, 28 Visvesvaraya, M., 117 Vivekananda, Swami, 73 Wade, 348 Waites, Bernard, 348 Washbrook, D., 41 welfare, concept of, 128 Westphalia: Treaty of, 67 Wilson, Kalpana, 15 World Bank, 104 World Trade Organization (WTO), 106 Yadav, Yogendra, 29 Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui, 333 Zamindari Abolition Act, 94 zim rakha , 325–27 Zins, Max, 21