chapter 2 - swagato sarkar in ajay gudavarthy

Re-framing Democracy

and Agency in India

Interrogating Political Society

Edited by

Ajay Gudavarthy

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition fi rst published in UK and USA 2012

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© 2012 Ajay Gudavarthy editorial matter and selection;

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Re-framing democracy and agency in India : interrogating political society / edited by

Ajay Gudavarthy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-85728-350-4 (hardback : alk. paper)

1. Democracy–India. 2. Political participation–India.

3. Civil society–India. 4. Postcolonialism–India. I. Gudavarthy, Ajay.

JQ281.R43 2012

320.954–dc23

2012000946

ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 350 4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 0 85728 350 2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an eBook.

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

List of Tables xi

Chapter 1 Introduction: Why Interrogate Political Society? 1

Ajay Gudavarthy

Part I: Political Society and Protest Politics

Chapter 2 Political Society in a Capitalist World 31

Swagato Sarkar

Chapter 3 Antinomies of Political Society – Implications

of Uncivil Development 49

Ajay Gudavarthy and G. Vijay

Chapter 4 Civil Society and the Urban Poor 73

Supriya RoyChowdhury

Chapter 5 Contentious Politics and Civil Society in Varanasi 93

Jolie M. F. Wood

Chapter 6 The Politics of a Political Society 125

Ranabir Samaddar

Part II: Political Society, Middlemen and Mobility

Chapter 7 The Pyraveekar: The ‘Fixer’ in Rural India 155

G. Ram Reddy and G. Haragopal

Chapter 8 Politics of Middlemen and Political Society 171

Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava

and René Véron

Chapter 9 Widows’ Organizations in Kerala State, India: Seeking

Citizenship amidst the Decline of Political Society 201

J. Devika and A. K. Rajasree

viii RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA

Part III: Civil Society and/or Political Society

Chapter 10 Clubbing Together: Village Clubs, Local NGOs

and the Mediations of Political Society 235

Tom Harrison

Chapter 11 Civic Anxieties and Dalit Democratic Culture:

Balmikis in Delhi 253

Omar Kutty

Chapter 12 The Habits of the Political Heart: Recovering Politics

from Governmentality 269

Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar

Chapter 13 Civil Society in the East and Some Dark Thoughts

about the Prospects of Political Society 289

Sanjeeb Mukherjee

Part IV: Rejoinder

Chapter 14 The Debate over Political Society 305

Partha Chatterjee

List of Contributors 323

Chapter 2

POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD1

Swagato Sarkar

Partha Chatterjee is one of the very few scholars in India who have

systematically tried to theorize the specifi city of Indian democratic politics.

His conceptualization of political society can be seen as an approach to

explicate the latter’s logics. This conceptualization has been modifi ed and

refi ned over the years by mediating on the concrete historical experience of

a post-colonial country and through a critical engagement with the received

Western normative political theory. In this paper, I will fi rst provide a sketch

of Chatterjee’s criticism of the concept of civil society, and then present a

critical review of his concept of political society. I will focus on the three

tension-ridden components of his project, viz. the defence of a communal

way of life, mapping the differentiated political space, and a suspicion towards

constitutionalism. I will argue, against Chatterjee, that the concept of political

society does not denote a positive political development, that is, it does not

present a possibility for ‘substantially redefi ning property and law’ in favour

of subaltern people/classes or the ‘actual expansion of the freedoms of the

people’; rather, it should be used to provide a critical insight into Indian

politics, particularly in relation to the process of capitalist expansion and

differentiation.

Chatterjee’s Critique of Civil Society

It is well known that the discussion on political society is embedded in the

debate on civil society and the critique of the conceptual infrastructure

of Western normative theory. In this debate, normatively, civil society has

1 This paper is a modified and expanded form of a paper published in 2008 (Sarkar

2008).

This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.

London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.

32 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA

been identifi ed as a domain for the expansion and realization of rights

and freedom (Cohen and Arato 1992), and instrumentally, it is seen as

a domain wherein the distribution, exercise and control of power are

(democratically) contested (Nonan-Ferrell 2004). With these two domains

taken together, civil society is an integral part of democracy and a

placeholder of institutions.

I will argue that Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Western normative theory

and civil society is primarily a critique of the subject (that is, citizen) that this

theory supposes. His critique draws attention to the interpellative structure

and the criteria of membership of the institutions proposed/assumed by this

theory, namely, the erasure of difference in favour of formal equality and

freedom (Chatterjee 2004). The effect of this formal interpellation is that the

state in its conduct can recognize or favour citizens only as unencumbered

individuals, severed of any primordial ties – a product of Western humanism

and secularism. Since the primordial identities of the citizens are not invoked

or referred to, they are rendered homogeneous before the state, namely, as

a nation. It is the will of the citizens, expressed as their generalized political

aspiration and popular sovereignty, which gives legitimacy to the state and

forms the basis of democracy.

Here, Chatterjee posits the concrete post-colonial context against the

normative concept of civil society, and argues that only a handful of the ‘elites’

in post-colonial countries can meet such a criterion of citizenship. These

elites are a product of modernity that has been inherited from colonialism,

and can meet the demand of being unencumbered either because they are

cultured/socialized into such a being, or can simply afford to ignore/avoid

their primordial identities. Hence, the scope of the concept of civil society is

restrictive. This (normative) theoretical position is also problematic because

the concept of ‘community’, which provides meaning to most of the people in

these countries, is suppressed and relegated to the pre-modern historical time

(Chatterjee 1993, 1998, 2004). Therefore, civil society is a limited normative

concept and an undifferentiated space.

Put differently, Western normative theory fi nds only a section of the

post-colonial society as the true bearer of modernity. One can note that,

by foregrounding communal being (and identity), Chatterjee differentiates

‘community’ from civil society in an ontological way, that is, a way of life

based on a shared kinship (see below), rather than a contractual (and formal)

associational life in civil society. He proposes to split the political space, and

to conceptualize a domain, separate and distinct from civil society, that is,

political society.

Thus, the following three issues are at stake here: (i) the difference in

ontology (/particular ways of life), (ii) the differentiation of political space, and



POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 33

(iii) the signifi cance of formal and normative concepts vis-à-vis the empirical

context. Chatterjee tries to engage with these three issues to provide a theory

of political society which will demonstrate the democratic urge and the

expansion of freedom of the members of political society (that is, subalterns)

in India and other post-colonial countries. In other words, he attempts to

develop a normative theory of (populist) democracy based on the experience of post-

colonial countries like India.

Chatterjee on Political Society

Chatterjee’s advocacy for the identifi cation of a different political space beyond

civil society rests on three moves. First, he focuses attention on the sphere

of governmental interventions where, he claims, a different kind of political

engagement between the legal–bureaucratic apparatus and the people who

are excluded from civil society can be witnessed.

The post-colonial Indian state inherited the legal-bureaucratic apparatus,

which is able ‘to reach as the target of many of its activities virtually all of

the population that inhabits its territory, [whereas] the domain of civil social

institutions…is still restricted to a fairly small section of “citizens”’ (Chatterjee

2001, 172). According to Chatterjee, this is a new paradigm, and there is a clear

shift from the abstract theoretical domain of citizenship to the actual domain

of (public) policy. Following Foucault, he claims that the domain of policy is

predicated upon a conception of the society as one constituted by population,

not citizens or ‘elementary units of homogenous families’ (Chatterjee 1998,

279; 2001, 173). ‘The regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of

citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for the well-

being of the population’ (Chatterjee 1998, 279). Thus, Chatterjee’s fi rst move

shifts the focus of political theory from the normative category of ‘citizen’ to

the descriptive and empirical category of ‘population’.

The concept of population is predicated upon an enumerable, descriptive,

and empirical ‘mass’ of people, and does not rely on a normative theory

or abstraction. The population is ‘assumed to contain, large elements of

‘naturalness’ and ‘primordiality’; the internal principles of the constitution

of particular population groups is not expected to be rationally explicable

since they are not the products of rational contractual association, but are,

as it were, pre-rational’ (Chatterjee 2001, 173 and passim). The concept

of population offers the governmental functions and apparatus an access to

‘a set of rationally manipulable instruments for reaching [a] large section of

the inhabitants of a country as the targets of “policy”.’

Chatterjee makes the second move by arguing that such interventions in

the society-as-population, if we may call it, and the interaction between these




governmental apparatus and the population groups inaugurate a new site for

strategic manoeuvring, resistance and appropriation. Chatterjee calls this site

political society. The strategic manoeuvre and mobilization that take place in

this domain neither always conform, nor are consistent with, the principles

of association in civil society – they often result in the transgression of law.

Yet, Chatterjee identifi es an ‘urge for democracy’ in this mobilization in

political society, as it channels the demands on the developmental state – the state

that looks after its people and provides benefi ts. Therefore, the subject at this

stage of his argument is a ‘subject of development’.

The third move is made by translating the ‘subject of development’ into

a ‘political subject’, by assigning an identity to it and fi nding a normative

ground for it. Chatterjee is interested in exploring how people use the space

opened by the intervention of governmental functions. As we have seen,

such interventions perceive the society as population and then categorize the

latter into empirical groups that become the ‘target’ for policies. However,

such categorization also infuses a new identity into the group, and many a

time, the constituents of the group emerge as distinct political entities. These

new groups have a territorial boundary, ‘clearly defi ned in time and space’

(Chatterjee 2004, 58 and passim). Consistent with his critique of civil society

and the foregrounding of community, Chatterjee tries to demonstrate how

these groups become a ‘community’ – and thus a collective, and also fi nds

a normative ground for the latter’s demands. According to him, since

the livelihood and existence of many of the members of such groups are

predicated upon a (collective) violation of (property) laws, they appear as

‘illegal entities’ before the state. They are not recognized as proper civic bodies,

pursuing legitimate objectives. Thus, to be recognized by the governmental

functions, they must ‘fi nd ways of investing their collective identity with a

moral content’ (ibid., 57 and passim) and thereby ‘give to the empirical form of a

population group the moral attributes of a community’ (emphasis in original). Yet this

community is about ‘the shared interests of the members of association...

they describe the community in…terms of a shared kinship… the most

common metaphor…is that of a family’.

Chatterjee never spells out what he means by the ‘moral content’ of an

identity, but it seems that these new groups appropriate the proposition of the

‘government’s obligation to look after the poor and underprivileged population

groups’ (Chatterjee 2004, 60). The objective of their mobilization is to ‘secure

the benefi ts of governmental programs’ (Chatterjee 2004, 66), which they

claim as ‘a matter of rights and use their association as the principal collective

instrument to pursue that claim’ (ibid., 59). This, according to Chatterjee, is a

clear break with the erstwhile patron–client exchanges, and an indication of

their political assertion.




Chatterjee explains that the mobilization which takes place on the terrain

of political society is ‘necessarily temporary and contextual’, and ‘depends

entirely on the ability of particular population groups to mobilize support to

infl uence the implementation of government policy in their favour’ (Chatterjee

2004, 60, emphasis added; note – implementation, not policy formulation, as he

has already mentioned, ‘The regime secures legitimacy not by the participation

of citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for the well-

being of the population’ [Chatterjee 1998, 279]). Such strategic politics must

operate within the constellation of the (mainstream) political formations (that

is, parties, but also non-governmental organizations?). The success of such

strategic manoeuvring depends on ‘applying the right pressure at the right

places in the governmental machinery’ (Chatterjee 2004, 66). However, they

do not always have access to such ‘right places’, and therefore, ‘to produce a

viable and persuasive politics of the governed, there has to be considerable act

of mediation’ (ibid., 64). Hence, there is a real need for fi nding trustworthy

mediators who can represent them.

It is through such political engagements that people are ‘substantial[ly]

redefi n[ing] property and law within the actually existing modern state’

(Chatterjee 2004, 75) and ‘are devising new ways in which they can choose how

they should be governed... people are learning, and forcing their governors

to learn, how they would prefer to be governed…[which itself is a] good

justifi cation for democracy’ (ibid., 77–78).

A Critical Appraisal of Political Society

As mentioned earlier, Chatterjee’s critique of civil society is predicated

on the critique of the subject that Western normative theory supposes.

Furthermore, his conceptualization of political society is predicated on the

difference in the modes of ‘transacting business with the constitutional state’

(Chatterjee 1998, 282). Thus, it is the modality of realization of rights that

separates political society from civil society. The difference in ontology which

Chatterjee introduced at the beginning of his critique of civil society – by

foregrounding the lived experience of a ‘communal’ being, as opposed to the

associational life of the unencumbered modern individuals in civil society –

is replaced with a critical appraisal of the procedural dimension of Indian

democracy (involved in ‘transacting business’, as quoted above). Even though

‘community’ is invoked in the discursive construction of the political subject,

the successful manoeuvring (including para-legal negotiations and transgression

and suspension of law) in political society is not dependent on that invocation;

rather it is dependent on the ‘majoritarian bias’, as we shall later see. In sum,

the communal–associational difference becomes untenable or insignifi cant




as Chatterjee carries forward his argument. While trying to explore the

ontology of this later position, we do not fi nd any elaboration of the concept

of the social. Rather, Chatterjee reads social relationships and practices ‘in

relation to the legal-political forms of the modern state’ (Chatterjee 2004, 74).

He engages neither with the immanent antagonisms in the social, nor with the

quasi-transcendental conditions of the possibility and impossibility of political

actions/interventions. To modify my last observation, I can say that, at the

ontological level, Chatterjee posits the difference between political society and

civil society in terms of the difference in the legal status of the entities that

the state encounters, and the contestation and negotiations which take place

over law, rules and norms become the focus of his analysis. It is, therefore, no

surprise to see that the procedural dimension unfolds in terms of judging the

legal status of the means of the chosen economic activity by, and amenities

for physical living of, the members of political society. Political action is seen

in terms of establishing the legal, or transgressing the illegal, status within

the black letter (property) law (which becomes a referent point). Political space,

then, is strictly the space of interaction between the state and the ‘population’.

Obviously, Chatterjee sees this in a positive light.

Chatterjee argues that as the new political entities wrangle over property

and benefi ts, they also strike at the foundation of property relations. Property,

Chatterjee reminds us, is ‘the conceptual name of regulations by law of

relations between individuals in civil society’ (Chatterjee 2004, 74 and passim).

But as these ‘social relations’ are yet to be ‘mo[u]lded into proper forms of

civil society, the state must maintain a fi ction that in the constitution of its

sovereignty, all citizens belong to civil society and are, by virtue of that legally

constructed fact, equal subjects of the law’. This ‘fi ctional’ element must be

addressed in the actual administrative processes.

The post-colonial (Indian) state not only fi nds a different legal entity/subject,

but also negotiates with it, instead of liquidating or banishing it. According

to Chatterjee, this negotiation does not take place because of the state’s

benevolence; rather these subjects force the state to do so. Therefore, a positive

appraisal of political society is pivoted on demonstrating the agency of the people

in forcing the state to recognize them. The normative dimension of political

society becomes visible in terms of delineating alternative (even if contingent)

criteria for the recognition by the state. The governmental functions and non-

governmental agencies are forced to recognize the ‘demands’ of the members of

political society in a different way. Since, these agencies do not recognize these

members or groups as part of civil society, so they cannot negotiate with them

according to the formal and strict procedures and law of the land, i.e. the so-called

autonomy of the state is not obtained here. Hence, there is a proliferation of

layered mediations and para-legal arrangements to resolve various contentious




issues, and to meet the demands of these groups. The governmental bodies and

political representatives deliberate and negotiate to identify the valid claims

(Chatterjee 2004, 69). However, such negotiations must be hidden and not

formally recorded, as ‘it is entirely possible that the negotiations on the ground

did not respect the principles of bureaucratic rationality or even the provisions

of law’ (ibid., 73). Chatterjee appreciates this ‘para-legal arrangement’ and the

actions in political society as an act of ‘actual expansion of the freedoms of the

people’ (ibid., 66 and passim). Chatterjee argues that certain groups participate

in political process by manoeuvring in political society, which is otherwise not

possible within the liberal space of the associations of civil society.2 He claims

that the transactions in political society open up the possibility to ‘effectively

work against the [existing] distribution of power in society as a whole’ (emphasis

in original). This possibility, according to him, is realized through the distribution

of property rights. He briefl y refers to Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which

‘embod[ies] a set of substantive freedoms rather than utilities or income or

primary goods’ (ibid., 68) to support his claim.

However, there is a limit to this ‘agency argument’, which also indicates

the limit of political society. First, there is a problem of scale. In view of the

fact that (successful) negotiations and the modalities of realization of rights

in political society are contingent and specifi c to a locale – the terminal stage

of application of power – the methodology (mostly ethnographic case studies)

can enlighten us about micro- and capillary politics, but not about the macro

processes. It will be diffi cult to induce a general condition of freedom from

such micro-political events even though it affi rms the liberal political theory

which posits an agent (here, the ‘governeds’) who experiences freedom, in both

the negative and positive ways, but it does not problematize the actual scale or

type of the structural conditions. However, since Chatterjee chooses to focus

on property relationships and welfare benefi ts, the structural conditions which

make capitalist expansion possible and to what extent the members of political

society can negotiate within capitalism and expand their freedom are at stake

here. Second, Chatterjee observes that the leverage in political society is linked

with the ‘inherent majoritarian bias of electoral democracy’ (Chatterjee

2008b, 90 and passim). Because of this bias, certain sections of the population

are excluded from political society, producing newly marginalized groups,

comprising of low-caste and adivasi people. ‘Political society and electoral

democracy have not given these groups the means to make effective claims on

2 This participation-through-manoeuvring is not based on a communal way of life, that

is, it is not a question of the communal way of life helping in the formation of a group,

analogous to the concept of class-in-itself. Successful manoeuvring depends on access

to mediators, as we will see below.




governmentality. In this sense, these marginalized groups represent an outside

beyond the boundaries of political society.’3 This third space (after civil and

political societies) is a new category in Chatterjee’s writing, which John and

Deshpande (2008, 85) call the ‘liminal zone’. Two points need to be noted

here: fi rst, the project (of political geography) to delineate and exhaustively

map the differentiated political space is under threat as we continuously need

to conceive new categories to capture this spatial differentiation exhaustively –

there is always a space which remains outside (here, ‘liminal zone’). Second,

the possibility of negotiation and transgression of law with impunity is

perhaps linked to this ‘majoritarian bias’ and the related capacity to form a

nexus between the elite and subaltern. As I mentioned earlier, the successful

manoeuvring in political society is not dependent on the communal way of

life; if it were so, then the stronger communal life of adivasi people would

have secured them a place in political society. Therefore, we need to question

Chatterjee’s ‘communitarian’ and post-modernist (/post-Marxist?) suspicion

towards law and constitutionalism, and argue that law, rules and norms can be

both emancipatory, on one hand, and repressive and disciplinary, on the other.

In other words, the transgression of law and contingent para-legal negotiations

cannot solely secure the emancipatory possibility (that is, the actual expansion

of freedom) for the members of political society, as Chatterjee argues. In the

next section, I will elaborate and dwell upon these critical issues.

Political Society as a Critique

Here, it is pertinent to ask why Chatterjee theorizes political society in

a statist/state-centric and legalistic way. It might be helpful to refer to the

original concept of governmentality to understand that impulse. While

developing the concept of political society, particularly in terms of ‘the politics

of the governed’, Chatterjee selectively draws from the Foucauldian concept

of governmentality. Governmentality, as we know, denotes the generalized

governmental rationality, beyond that of the state. Methodologically, it studies

the strategic fi eld of application of power, whose problematic is: ‘[H]ow

best to govern[?]’ (O’Malley et al. 1997, 502). Governmentality is about

the organization of resources and institutions, and establishment of norms

and practices, among other things, and about justifying this constellation.

Thereby, as we know, power assumes a productive dimension, rather than a

3 Samir Kumar Das argues that there are sections of the population that escape the

calculative logic of enumeration and thereby they become the ‘ungoverneds’. But it is

not clear why this should be the case, that is, the kind of logical inconsistency or limit

of governmentality involved here is not readily understood.




negative and repressive one. Thomas Lemke argues that the salient feature of

Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality is that it ‘links technologies

of the self with technologies of domination, the constitution of the subject to

the formation of the state; and fi nally, it helps to differentiate between power

and domination’ (Lemke 2002, 51).

Government refers to more or less systematized, regulated and refl ected

modes of power (a ‘technology’) that go beyond the spontaneous

exercise of power over others, following a specifi c form of reasoning (a

‘rationality’) which defi nes the telos of action or the adequate means to

achieve it. (Lemke 2002, 53)

And thereby, ‘structuring and shaping the fi eld of possible action of subjects’

(ibid., 52).

In Chatterjee’s conceptualization of political society and the case studies

that he engages with, we never see the interlinkage between the ‘technologies

of the self ’ and ‘technologies of domination’. As mentioned earlier, what

comes out is the politicization of the process of surveying and categorization

(which are not exactly the ‘technologies of domination’) of the population,

that is, people use the very categories that are generated or used in surveys and

censuses (which again are not exactly the ‘technologies of the self ’), to stake

claims on the state. Read in this way, Chatterjee’s notion of the ‘governed’

as a subject of political society is nominal, and the process of ‘subjection to

power’ in the domain of governmental/public policy – which is the premise

of Chatterjee’s argument – does not end up producing/constructing any

subjectivity as such. And this happens, because governmentality is played out

in India exclusively within the body politic of the state, not beyond the latter.4

My statement might seem to be contradictory to Chatterjee’s (2008b, 93) later

claim that ‘governmental power...is no longer restricted to the branches of

the state…but extends to a host of non-state and even non-governmental

agencies’. Chatterjee does not defi ne ‘governmental power’ explicitly; however,

it is evident that he sees ‘governmental power’ to be beyond the state from the

standpoint of the institutional space of application of power, but not from the

problematic of ‘subject’, ‘subjectivity’5 and rationality.

In Chatterjee’s writings, ‘governmentality’ is just an alternative way of

understanding the interaction of the Indian state with the population, and

4 One can observe the nascent attempts at expanding governmentality beyond the state

in projects like the Unique Identity (UID) project or Aadhaar.

5 This problematic is central in Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality. Refer to

‘Two Lectures’ by Foucault (1980), particularly pages 97–8.




does not refer to the generalized ‘governmental rationality’ – perhaps, that

itself points to the post-colonial predicament. A lack of mediation on this

predicament makes political society a theory of politics6 – describing the

modes of transaction between the state and the ‘governeds’. A description

of the social conditions in which the ‘governeds’ fi nd themselves does not

elucidate or clarify the ontology of the social, from which the specifi city of

the post-colonial condition (and the predicament therein) – a sketch of which

is attempted below – can be explained or elaborated.7 Without such a critical

engagement, Chatterjee remains within the liberal strand of political theory,

wherein the expansion of the liberal institutional order is presented as an

unlimited, albeit a hindered or interrupted, process. Since Chatterjee does

not read the practices of governmentality as political logics, governmentality

almost becomes a shorthand for such a liberal political order, already in a

position to accommodate and subsume various negativities, particularly in

the context of capitalist expansion, which is an evolutionist view of political

order. Chatterjee does not deconstruct the metaphysics (of presence) of such

political practices, which could point to the impossibility of constituting an

order and thereby also demonstrate (again) the limit of naming a political space

as civil or political society.

If the theory of political society has to be statist, then it might be more

helpful to conduct a thorough investigation of the ways in which the post-

colonial state ‘transacts business with the population’ and the consequences

of that on the established laws, rules and norms from various perspectives/

standpoints. What emerges from Chatterjee’s description in various cases (and

many scholars would also attest to the factual basis of those) is that the post-

colonial state is contradictory and indecisive in its conduct:8 on the one hand, it

is marked by hesitancy and weakness in obtaining compliance with the existing

codifi ed norms and in enforcing certain legal and executive orders, while on

6 I borrow the term ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ from Chantal Mouffe, where ‘the political’

refers to ‘the dimension of antagonism which [is] constitutive of human societies’,

and ‘politics’ refers to ‘the set of practices and institutions through which an order is

created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the

political’ (Mouffe 2005, 9).

7 Also, without such a consideration, the emergence of political subjects cannot be

understood. The Foucauldian understanding of subject formation through subjection

to power has been thoroughly criticized by Jacques Derrida. Refer to Derrida (1972,

1973) and Ernesto Laclau (1990).

8 Say the hesitancy of the erstwhile Left Front Government of West Bengal in the case of

the rotting corpse of Balak Brahmachari of the Santan Dal (a religious sect) (Chatterjee

2004, 41–51), and the same government’s use of police force, time and again, in suppressing

and killing (political) dissidents (in Marichhjhapi, Singur and Nandigram).




the other hand, it can be extraordinarily violent (that is, in using violent means

and in violating the constitutional rights, legal provisions, and procedures) – all

of which cannot be solely seen as a response to the manoeuvring prevalent in

political society. The other side of this argument is that the law and rules can

be transgressed by powerful people for exploiting members of political society

or causing them misery and inconvenience (for example, the encroachment

of village and forest land by the mining companies in Bellary in Karnataka;

diversion of PDS rice, etc.). We also know that in the face of resource scarcity

and other impediments, the actors, including both powerful people and

members of political society, practise jugad, that is, they arrange things for

themselves. It is also possible to provide alternative explanations for the post-

colonial state’s tolerance of violation of (public) property rights, particularly

in the context of the informal economy. Barbara Harriss-White (2009, 155)

provides such an alternative argument:

The state’s relation to PCP [petty commodity production] is both

ambivalent and contradictory – simultaneously endorsing actions which

destroy PCP, protect it, promote it and permit it through enforcement

failures and neglect. First, the state destroys PCP by means such as

physical eviction and by displacement as a result of promoting capital-

biased technology. Second, it subsidizes and promotes the reproduction

of small enterprises not through production but through whatever

infrastructural and welfare/social sector interventions are aimed at

sustaining the households involved in it. Third the state promotes

production by small enterprises not just with self-help groups and

by permitting a mass of more or less experimental micro fi nance

arrangements but also by condoning and not policing the onward

lending of ‘formal’ credit on unregulated terms and conditions

which prevent the borrowers from accumulating. Fourth, to prevent

mass unemployment, widespread malnutrition, etc., it implements –

more or less exiguously – policies that prevent the destruction of

small scale production, trade and services. In so doing it creates small

enterprises it cannot regulate and incidentally also restricts accumulation.

Its infrastructural responsibilities to employers may be avoided if

production is outsourced to petty producers. It does not enforce laws

through which the super-exploitative advantage of petty production

would be abolished. Nor does it enforce fi scal measures that would

threaten through taxation the nutrient-bed of petty production. So

PCP also thrives through neglect because the small individual capitals

involved do not accumulate suffi ciently for the revenue from tax to

outweigh the costs of its collection.




These contradictory and indecisive – and perhaps pragmatic – approaches

of the state indicate a predicament which underlines the power relationships

in a post-colonial country. This predicament has been conceptualized as the

condition of ‘dominance without hegemony’ by Ranajit Guha. Guha defi nes

hegemony within a fi eld of power, that is, a ‘series of inequalities’ or ‘unequal

relationships’ (Guha 1998, 20), as ‘a condition of Dominance (D) such that, in the

organic composition of D, Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C)’ and ‘hegemony

operates as a dynamic concept and keeps even the most persuasive structure

of Dominance always and necessary open to Resistance’ (ibid., 23, emphasis in

original). ‘Dominance without hegemony’ is the condition wherein persuasion

never manages to outweigh coercion, that is, coercion becomes explicit in

the formation and operation of power relationships. It is this condition that

propels the development of strategies of co-optation and negotiations, in an

attempt to defer or modify the (often inevitable) application of force.

In the Indian context, the bourgeoisie never loses interest in the accumulation

of capital, yet adopts various strategies to dispel the antagonisms it faces in that

process and negotiates with certain impediments. Does the Indian bourgeoisie

manage to persuade ‘the people’ to facilitate the process of accumulation or

does it ultimately depend on the application of force, or a mix of both? This

question returns in the context of the recent economic transformation in

India, on which Chatterjee published two articles in 2008.

In the fi rst article, Chatterjee (2008a) engages with the political economy

of the recent economic transformation in India to delineate the changing

relationships among the dominant groups. Here, the central problematic is the

sole ascendancy of private industrial-corporate capital in India to the position

of hegemonic domination which is accomplished with the ‘connivance’

[in my words] of the ‘urban middle classes’ – ‘the sphere that seeks to be

congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil society’ (Chatterjee

2008a, 57) – and the parallel decline of the ‘agrarian bourgeoisie’ (ibid., 56).

Such ascendancy of industrial-corporate capital is rendered possible through

‘primitive accumulation’, namely, ‘the dissociation of the labourer from the

means of labour [i.e. production]’ (ibid., 54) and the attendant transfer of

those means of production to the capitalists. Chatterjee thinks that political

society again becomes a signifi cant fi eld of contestation and interventions in

this new context: the need to reverse the effects of the ‘primitive accumulation’

necessitates that the governmental agencies engage with political society to

distribute the benefi ts, following the modality described above. But this

contestation has been part of the ‘passive revolution of capital’ right from

the beginning of the career of the post-colonial state, as can be gleaned from

Sudipta Kaviraj’s critique (which is seen from the standpoint of the state).

Kaviraj’s critique of ‘passive revolution’ is predicated on the proposition




that ‘the state in India is a bourgeois state’ (Kaviraj 1997, 48), which ‘helps

in capitalist reproduction’ (ibid., 49 and passim), when capital on its own

cannot expand through market transactions and, therefore, depends on ‘the

legitimized directive mechanisms of the state’.

Kaviraj observes, ‘The Indian capitalist class exercises its control over

society neither through a moral-cultural hegemony of the Gramscian type,

nor a simple coercive strategy on the lines of satellite states of the Third

World’ (ibid., 51 and passim). Such a control is achieved through a ‘coalitional

strategy carried out partly through the state-directed process of economic

growth, partly through the allocational necessities indicated by the bourgeois

democratic political system’ (emphasis added).

The (capitalist) dominance over the society is achieved through the practices

of governance, which according to Kaviraj, ‘refers to the process of actual

policy decisions within the apparatuses of the state’ (ibid., 54 and passim). The

dominance is created by establishing sets of ‘vertical clientilist benefi t coalition’9

(emphasis in the original) between the ruling bloc and subordinate classes

through certain policies. Such an approach is concerned with the ‘calculations

of short-term political advantages accruing from policies’. The objective10 of

establishing benefi t coalitions is to ‘ensure that actual political confi gurations

do not become symmetrical to class divisions in society’.

Although one can argue, after Kaviraj, that creating vertical clientilist

benefi t coalitions is the logics of political society vis-à-vis capitalist expansion

and ‘primitive accumulation’, yet it will be diffi cult to normatively evaluate

it as a positive development (in terms of expansion of freedom). An ‘agency

argument’11 is not enough to salvage such an evaluation. This is because the

very condition of capital accumulation depends on creating such vertical

benefi t coalitions, which is a ‘social cost’ to accumulation, and such a

cost does not alter or threaten the course of capitalist transformation and

expansion (in an ontological and not a historicist sense, and thereby not

9 I will argue that this can be seen as the institutionalized form of the colonial idiom of

‘Improvement’, through which ‘the colonial rulers [used] to relate nonantagonistically to the

ruled’ (Guha 1998, 30, emphasis added).

10 Arun Patnaik offered an alternative argument. Patnaik (1988, 30) found the poverty

alleviation programmes and targeting the poor in the 1970s as the ‘state’s paternalistic

attitude to the rural poor’, through which the state ‘diffused among the poor peasants

its own organizational contradictions and tried to wean them away from the social

contradictions of the real life’.

11 I will argue that the question of agency in these discussions always arises ex post facto, at

the moment of attributing the credit (or autonomy) of the action to a particular subject.

The question of identifi cation and recognition of that subject is very much part of

the above objective. Therefore, to consider the ‘agency’ as a (starting) premise of an

argument is limited in explaining the case.




being a question of teleological transition). I will argue that such vertical

benefi t coalitions and para-legal negotiations simply constitute a factual

and descriptive state of affairs in the domain of power relationships, and are

bereft of any immediate normative problematization.12 Since interventionist

and transformational politics requires a normative evaluation, and the

signifi cance and purchase of political society depends on showing the actual

expansion of freedom of the members of political society, it is also diffi cult to

see any transformational potential of the development of ‘political society’,

parallel to ‘civil society’.

Let me summarize my critique of Chatterjee. The project of mapping the

differentiated political space or defending the communal way of life has not

been ultimately signifi cant enough for Chatterjee to develop a theory of Indian/

post-colonial democracy; on the other hand, the practice of transgression

of law, rules and norms in India has to be accepted. However, the point

is whether we can undertake any normative evaluation of this empirical

context and proclaim that it helps in realizing the rights and freedom of

members of political society. In other words, we need to question whether the

(political) sociological understanding of political society can help us develop

a philosophical understanding of democracy in India. Alternatively, if the

transgression of law has to be taken seriously, then we should be able to use

the concept of political society to underline the undecidability and aporetic

conditions present in constitutionalism and in the process of realization of

rights, justice and freedom, which provides a critique of the liberal theory

of democracy, that is, it shows the limit of democracy under the capitalist

system. This standpoint neither harbours a Marxist/anarcho-communitarian

suspicion towards constitutionalism, nor does it attempt to furnish a liberal/

modernist defence of the rule of law. This is what I mean by ‘political society

as critique’, which I elaborate below.

The context at hand is capitalist transformation, which requires a

reorganization of property relationships, mobility of capital, curbing

of labour rights, rationing of social benefi ts, grabbing of resources and

maintaining and enhancing of the ‘value’ (actually, price) of property

through urban ‘development’ and beautifi cation. Political society can

be a useful concept and an analytical tool to study the condition through

which antagonisms that were immanent or developed within this process of

capitalist transformation in a post-colonial country (that is, the new frontiers

of capitalist expansion and growth) are defl ected, deferred or nullifi ed.

12 One can develop this argument further by engaging with Jacques Rancière’s concept

of politic(al)s as ‘disagreement’ (1998, 2004), which necessarily involves such a

problematization.




The concept of political society, therefore, can be used to critique this post-colonial

condition. But that does not mean that we should overturn Chatterjee’s insight

and treat political society as a successful strategic fi eld of the dominant classes,

which is structured to overcome the problematic of ‘dominance without

hegemony’, that is, the development of a non-coercive and persuasive

political condition for capitalist transformation. Violence is embedded in

this process. Amita Baviskar and Nandini Sundar (2008) draw attention to

the application of force and infl iction of violence in contemporary India.

They argue that such an application of force makes civil society ‘not a

domain of hegemony’, ‘but of domination’ (ibid., 89), implying that the

division between and distinction of civil and political societies along the axes

of civility and legality is misleading.

If the concept of political society is to be treated as a critical tool, and

no ready transformational politics can be found within it, then the obvious

question is: How does one think about ‘the political’ and transformational

politics? Chatterjee’s critics see politics in terms of contingency and the

empirical specifi city of a struggle, and fall back on the ‘agency argument’.

They suggest that in order to appreciate contemporary subaltern politics, one

needs to study the cases of resistance (John and Deshpande 2008, 86), to see the

success in getting the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA),

the Forest Act, and the Right to Information Act (RTI) as an outcome of

people’s ‘own degree of organization and their increased ability to speak in

terms of the very law that is used to dispossess them’ (Baviskar and Sundar

2008, 88), and to look out for ‘spaces, which the ruling classes are compelled to

open up in an attempt to legitimize their positions of power’ so as to ‘(utilize)

[those spaces] with a renewed creativity by those fi ghting for a more equal, less

exploitative social order’ (Shah 2008, 81).

While replying to his critics, Chatterjee re-calibrates political society by

introducing two more concepts: ‘moral passion’ and ‘populism’ (populism is

defi nitely a new turn in his theorization). He explains:

It is mistaken to claim that the dominant and propertied classes any

longer set the standards of morality for society; rather, in a democratic

age, the moral passion of entitlement and outrage is on the side of those

who have little… (Chatterjee 2008b, 92 and passim)

The political dimension is seen in terms of ‘struggle’ (clash and confl ict) – not

by clarifying the negativity or antagonism at the ontological level (that is, that

which leads to the confl ict): ‘Since the intentions emerge from the arena of

politics, it goes without saying that they are shaped by the struggles between

rival groups and classes in that arena.’




The character of the politics which emerges in this fi eld – a ‘fi eld created by

governmentality’ – is populist, and ‘populism13 is the only morally legitimate

form of democratic politics today’. Thus, it seems that Chatterjee stands by

his earlier claim that the ‘politics of the governed’ is ‘shifting the historical

horizon of political modernity in most of the world’ (Chatterjee 2004, 75).

This insistence on seeing political society as an innovative and promising

political development ignores the other possibilities of (progressive) political

interventions. The analysis of governmentality entails the study of a very

specifi c domain, namely the mode of application and transformation in

governmental rationality and power, and resistances to it. This does not exhaust

the possibilities of analysing other domains of power relationships and the

dislocating events within those, or of anticipating other forms of progressive

political interventions. These limitations are also inherited by the analysis of

political society as such. Thus, the concept of political society as a critique of

Indian politics is a much stronger position to defend.

Alternatively, we may adopt a different methodology to understand the

political and the transformational politics. We need to ask whether political

theory should always start with (a refl ection on) the state and civil society,

while trying to understand/question the post-colonial political modernity.

Instead of a statist/state-centric normative discussion, can we not begin with

the conceptualization of the social, explicate its ontology, and then proceed

from there to apprehend the quasi-transcendental conditions of possibility

and impossibility of political change?

Conclusion

I have argued in this paper that the concept of political society can be more

useful as a critique of Indian politics, rather than as an alternative normative

theory, which can only extend the criteria of recognition by the state. What

the concept of political society warns us about is that a certain section of the

society is marginalized and that their demands do not become part of

mainstream political articulations in civil society. Political society alerts us

about various strategies that are being developed, how people use the spaces

available in a democracy to raise/place various demands, and how those

13 In defence of ‘populism’, Chatterjee quotes Ernesto Laclau. But, I think, it is a

misapplication. For Laclau (2007, 2005), populism stands as a problematic of staging the

people within democracy, which is preceded by a Claude Lefort–inspired understanding

of power, which is empty (that is, there is a lack) at the core, and hegemonic politics is

practised in an attempt to fill or occupy that emptiness or lack. ‘The people’ becomes

the constituency constructed or is the locus in this hegemonic political practice.




demands are dealt with in a piecemeal way to mitigate antagonism and

facilitate the ‘passive revolution of capital’. Yet, such strategies cannot fully

hegemonize ‘the people’, and force the bourgeoisie to resort to violent means.

Political society as a critique marks out the problematic of perseverance of the

condition of ‘dominance without hegemony’ and the return or the spectre of

‘the people’14 in a democracy.

Chatterjee reminds us that ‘governmentality always operates on a

heterogeneous social fi eld, on multiple population groups, and with multiple

strategies’ (Chatterjee 2004, 60 and passim). We have also seen that the politics

in political society is ‘necessarily temporary and contextual’. Thus, any

political intervention that wants to overcome this fragmentary and temporary

politics would necessitate an engagement with hegemonic politics, a process

of constructing a broader political movement beyond the fragmentary ones.

Programmatic issues are involved in such a transformational politics, but any

mediation on such political programmes cannot begin without an understanding

of the specifi city of the post-colonial condition and predicament, which in

turn, requires an ontological analysis. The outcome of such an analysis will

not necessarily initiate a transformation, but it will at least provide a critical

insight into various political processes.

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chapter 2 - swagato sarkar in ajay gudavarthy

Documents

vertical benet

regime secures

interrogating

generalized

differentiated

western normative

recent economic

small enterprises