DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION OR PUBLISHED COMMENTThe Political Science of DevelopmentbyPaul R. BrassPrepared for the festschrift conference, India and the Politics of Developing Countries:Essays in Honor of Myron Weiner, held at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies,University of Notre Dame, September 24-26, 1999.The Political Science of DevelopmentPaul R. BrassIn 1963, Myron published an article that I regard as one of his most importantshort pieces on Indian politics.In that article, he posited the existence in India of what hecalled two political cultures, one that manifested itself in the districts and localities,both urban and rural,1 and the other that inhabited the national capital, whose denizensoccupied the Indian Civil Service, the Planning Commission, and the leading body in thegoverning party, the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress.2Myronclearly thought carefully whenhe chose names for these two cultures.He rejected theidea that one was a modern culture, the other traditional because, as he said, there areaspects of both modernity and traditionalism penetrating both views,3 therebyanticipating by a few years the Rudolphs book, The Modernity of Tradition.4He choseinstead the terms, elite political culture and mass political culture.The former waselite not only or even primarily in social background, but in its outlook which, despiteMyrons recognition that it contained traditional components, was modernistic andrationalistic.The elite culture was the mtier of the developmentalist elite determined todevelop and modernize India: its economy, political institutions, and some aspects of itssocial customs as well.The mass political culture, on the other hand, was permeatedwith traditional elements, but not wholly traditional.5Its inhabitants occupied thelower rungs of Indian politics and were in closer touch with the Indian masses.Both cultures were also expanding: the elite culture was radiating out from itspolitical center in New Delhi, while the mass culture was expanding from the localities upto the state legislative assemblies, state governments and state administrations.6Themass political culture reflected the social organization and attitudes of the bulk of thecountrys population; local politicians who inhabited this culture understood and knewhow to operate within the categories of caste, tribe, ethnicity, and local and regionallanguages.The elite culture operated largely in English, had a vision for the country as awhole, and was attuned as much to the outside, Western world as to Indian society.Myron thought it inevitable that the two cultures would clash as they expanded inopposite directions towards each other.He thought there was a danger to be feared fromsuch a clash, which might arise especially from the conflict between the utopianelements in the elite modernizing vision and the orientation of politicians in the mass

1Myron Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, in Myron Weiner, Political Change in SouthAsia (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963), p. 114.2Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, p. 138.3 Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, p. 149.4Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Developmentin India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).5Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, p.114.6Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, p.114.Brass Political Science of Development 2political culture towards their caste, kin, and ethnic groups and the demands forpatronage and power7 that emanated from them and their clients.Myron was sympathetic to the mass political culture and the concerns that arosefrom it while atthe same time sharing the elite developmental goals for India.Hethought, however, that it was necessary for the governing elites to recognize that, in ademocracy, one had to modify ones utopian expectations to the realities of struggle anddemands emanating from below.He feared that, in its desire to modernize India asrapidly as possible, the elites might be tempted to sacrifice democratic practices andimpose an authoritarian regime to deal with the inevitable crises that would arise as thetwo cultures came into more direct conflict.Myron was not alone in his awareness of this kind of tension in Indian societyand politics, which some observers also thought described the basic dilemma of thedeveloping, democratizing Third World.The general idea of the dilemma as a problem forall developing countries was perhaps first articulated by Shils in his concept of the gapbetween the national and the parochial cultures that existed simultaneously and in actualor potential tension within all the developing countries.8Morris-J ones also formulated asimilar conundrum for India in his trichotomous conceptualization of the simultaneouspresence of three idioms in India, which he characterized as the modern, the traditional,and, in his own original contribution to the discussion, the saintly.The latter termreferred to those political persons in India who adopted the style, tone, and moral outlookof Gandhi in their approach to Indian social, poltical, and economic problems.9Morris-J ones also was careful to assert that these terms did not necessarily reflect the existenceof sharply differentiated ideologies, world views, or cultures by his very choice of a termto describe them.The term idiom carries the sense that these were ways of talking aboutand articulating Indias problems and their solutions, which might or might not reflectfundamental differences among those who had command of them.There have been many other ways in which this simultaneous existence ofdistinct, but interpenetrating cultures have been articulated.Before Shils and Weiner,there was Redford and Singers Great Tradition and Little Tradition, which, in effect,posited a gap within the traditional society itself, which naturally became further

7Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, pp. 150-51.8Edward Shils, Political Development in the New States (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), originallypublished in Comparative Studies in Society and History, II (1959-60).9W. H. Morris-J ones, The Government and Politics of India (London: Hutchinson UniversityLibrary, 1964)., ch. ii.Many commentators on Indian politics have since made effective use of Morris-J ones formulation of the saintly idiom and its role in Indian politics.For example, Wariavwalla,commenting on the political crusade launched by V. P. Singh against corruption in the Rajiv Gandhigovernment--the famous Bofors incident--that ultimately brought him to power as prime minister,remarked: The Singh episode illustrates one persistent reality of Indian politics: effective opposition to theruling party and the government at large comes not from established political parties but from individualswho employ a saintly language of political discourse.J P did that in 1973-75, as did Gandhi during theindependence struggle.J an J agran, or the moral awakening of people, was what Singh embarked upon inJ uly-August, and on Gandhi's birth anniversary October 2 [1987] he launched the J an Morcha (people'splatform) movement and agitation.Cleaner politics and more participatory democracy are its stated aims.Bharat Wariavwalla, India in 1987: Democracy on Trial, Asian Survey, XXVIII, No. 2 (February, 1988),121.Brass Political Science of Development 3complicated with the entry of British rule and European culture operating alongside.Inthis view, there was then a double gap in contemporary India that was mediated throughtwo distinct processes, the Sanskritization process that Srinivas described and theWesternization process that many social scientists and historians discussed.Washbrookarticulated a similar kind of dichotomy that arose during British rule as the British soughtto build the Raj as a modern secular state, whose principles came into conflict withcompetitive ethnicity, status-derived privilege, religiously based personal law, andcaste mobilisation. British attempts to accommodate to some of these traditionalpractices only complicated matters further, in some cases stimulating the very processes,such as caste mobilisation,that secular institutions were designed to ignore ortranscend.10After Independence, Nehru, whom Dua has characterized aptly as a greatmythmaker of political institutions, sought to maintain the secular institutionsestablished by the British while simultaneously democratizing them.After his death,however, the very crisis that Myron predicted began to develop, as Nehrus daughter,Indira Gandhi, undermined the institutions that Nehru cherished and imposed instead anauthoritarian interlude to head off a boiling cauldron of discontent from below thatthreatened her hold on power, substituting for the elite institutional culture a new cultureof illegalities.11 The restoration of the competitive parliamentary system in 1980 did not,however, restore the secular institutional culture of Nehru. Instead there followed anintensification of the crisis of political cultures in conflict, in which broadened bases ofmass participation made possible the mobilization of national constituencies whilesimultaneously there was an expansion of regional electoral constituencies based upondistinctive patterns of social and political organization and conflict based upon castes,religious communities, language, and tribal groups.In the Rajiv Gandhi landslide victoryof 1985, in the aftermath of his mothers assassination, the plebiscitarian base that hismother had built from the new mass culture prevailed for the time being,12 but did notefface the local, district bases of power that continued to survive and to provide the corepolitical support for opposition parties.13The Rudolphs too have articulated the concept of the gap between the twocultures in their own way in their distinction between the forms of politics in Indiaexpressed by organized interest groups that work primarily in institutionally definedpolicy arenas and make use of expertise and lobbying skill, on the one hand, anddemand groups that rely more on symbolic and agitational politics.The latter, as theRudolphs describe them have become a highly elaborate political art form that speaks to

10D. A. Washbrook, Ethnicity and Racialism in Colonial Indian Society, in R. Ross (ed.),Racism and Colonialism (The Hague: Martijnus Nijhoff, 1982, pp. 164-165.11B. D. Dua, Presidential Rule in India, 1950-1984: A Study in Crisis Politics., rev. Ed. (NewDelhi: S. Chand, 1985), p. 407.12Harold A. Gould, A Sociological Perspective on the Eighth General Election in India, AsianSurvey, XXVI, No. 6 (J une, 1986), p. 637.13Gould, A Sociological Perspective, p.651.Brass Political Science of Development 4Indias indigenous political culture through specifically Indian type of tacticsandpublic dramas that are used to mobilize sometimes huge crowds of demonstrators.14Finally, the gap has also been articulated in postmodernist form, using theFoucauldian term, discourse.In this formulation, contributed by Kaviraj, there is anupper discourse in India, articulated by the ruling modernist elites and a lowerdiscourse that is indigenous.The former is a secular, liberal, rational, enlightenmentdiscourse derived from the West, the latter is not clearly specified except that it ispopular.The problem of the gap that Kaviraj sees is one of incoherence between theupper and the lower; that is, the very terms used by the Nehruvian elites wereincomprehensible to the lower orders.Kaviraj does not refer to the lower orders in Indiansociety in terms of caste or ethnicity for, following Benedict Anderson, he sees them asmerely imagined, having nothing objective about them.Indeed, the whole picture thatwe have of Indian society is a construction of British Orientalism.Kaviraj, joining theranks of Nandy, Madan, and Chatterjee, seeks a new discursive framework for analyzingIndian society and politics.He criticizes the inadequate theory of modernisation workedout by Parsonian developmentalists15 and the blundering inadequacies of modernAmerican development theory.16 Unfortunately, Kaviraj and his colleagues offer nothingintelligible to take its place, except such phrases as the recovery of religious tolerance17in India.In fact, Kaviraj himself bemoans the absence even of an indigenous vocabularyfor making sense of the political world of contemporary India.18But, in fact, there is a kind of indigenous vocabulary to make sense of Indiaspolitical world to ordinary Indians.It is a vocabulary that draws upon the religio-mythological history of India, that draws its symbols from Indian epics and the deitiesthat are depicted therein.19Moreover, it manages to combine this vocabulary with amodernist outlook that challenges the secular ideology that was dominant in India duringNehrus lifetime, proposing to substitute instead true secularism for the pseudo-secularism of the Nehru era, a Hindu secularism based on Hindu pride, Hindu history,and Hindu heroes.While Nandy, Madan, Chatterjee, and Kaviraj were making their owncritique of the Nehruvian developmentalist strategy, the strategy and its ideological baseswere already crumbling.As J affrelot has put it, secularism and socio-economicdevelopment were supplanted by entirely different values in the nation's political

14Lloyd I. and Susanne H. Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the IndianState (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 252-253.15Sudipta Kaviraj, On State, Society and Discourse in India, in J ames Manor (ed.), RethinkingThird World Politics (London: Longman, 1991), p. 94.16Kaviraj, On State, Society and Discourse, p. 97.17The phrase comes, of course, from Ashis Nandy, The Politics of Secularism and the Recoveryof Religious Tolerance, in Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors inSouth Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 69-93.18Kaviraj, , On State, Society and Discourse, p.96.19On this matter of the effective (mis)use of central cultural icons from Indias religio-mythological repertory, notably the Ramayana, see especially, Richard Davis, The Iconography of RamsChariot, find citation and Sheldon Pollock, Ramayana and Political Imagination in India, Journal ofAsian Studies, LII, No. 2 (May, 1993), 261-297, citation from p. 262.Brass Political Science of Development 5discourse, and the Congress itself appealed to ethno-religious sentiments.20 Although Ido not accept the argument sometimes made that Nandy, Madan, Chatterjee, and Kavirajare crypto-Hindu nationalists,21 the problem is that they offer no serious politicalalternative, no sound basis for critique of the political and social crises through whichIndia is passing today, nothing substantial to counter the rise of militant Hindunationalism and its leading organizations today: the BJ P, the RSS, the VHP, and theBajrang Dal.In the remainder of this paper, I want to argue that there has indeed been anintellectual gap in our approach to Indian politics that derives from the developmentalistperspective, which was reflected also in Myrons work.At the same time, I want tosuggest how Myron made a significant move away from the developmentalist frameworkin his last book on India and how we may move further away from that framework andmodify the methods that we have used to analyze Indian society and politics in order tobetter comprehend what is happening in India today.My argument, in brief, is that thepolitical science of development has itself been implicated in the developmentalistframework of Indias political elites.Further, despite the rhetoric of socialism thataccompanied that framework under Nehru, both the practice in India and the developmenttheory that justified it, were fundamentally conservative.The conservative elements inthe developmentalist framework comprised an ideology of state-exaltation, arising out of afear of disorder that I have analyzed elsewhere or, as Inden has put it, an orientationtowards the maintenance of order and towards elimination of the causes of unrest.22Soimplicated were we in the developmentalist goals of Indias elites that we failed toprovide an independent basis for critique that has become increasingly necessary as it hasbecome more and more obvious that those goals have failed to transform India into themodern, industrial state of its elites imaginings, have failed at the same time to providefor the basic minimum needs of its peoples, have failed to eliminate the causes of unrestand have instead drawn India into the ugly morass of state terrorism in the northeast,Punjab, and Kashmir, and have failed to provide a basis for accommodation between theHindu and Muslim populations of the country.The remainder of this paper is divided into four sections.In the next three, Iprovide examples from the literature that demonstrate the theoretical hold that thedevelopmentalist perspective has held over most of us during the past several decades.The examples are, in part, arbitrary; many other examples could have been provided.Ihave chosen for purposes of illustration three sets of examples.The following sectiondiscusses statements about Indian politics that refer to the relationship between organized

20Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s:Strategies of Identity-Building, Implantation and Mobilisation (with special reference to Central India(London: Hurst, 1966), p.9.21A rather extreme and lengthy statement of this accusation against Nandy, in particular, has beenpublished recently by Radhika Desai, Culturalism and Contemporary Right: Indian Bourgeoisie andPolitical Hindutva, Economic and Political Weekly [hereafter referred to as EPW], XXXIV, No. 12 (March20, 1999), 695-712.22Ronald Inden, Embodying God: from imperial progresses to national progress in India,Economy and Society, XXIV, No. 2 (May, 19 95), p. 263.Brass Political Science of Development 6demands and political development.(I have arbitrarily left aside for this purpose the evenmore complicated issues surrounding the relationship between mass movements or theRudolphs demand groups and political development, but only because discussion ofthis and so many other issues would fill a small book.)In the third section, I consider thespecific question of democratic development, again leaving aside here other veryinteresting and important questions such as how democracy has been defined and themeaning of such terms as participation with reference to Indian democracy.In thefourth section, I discuss the questions of governance and governability as these termshave been used by political scientists of India.Section five discusses someepistemological issues under the rubric of research methods, particularly how the latterhave been implicated in the developmentalist discourse and how they have neverthelessalso in the past and may in future show a way out of the clutches of that framework.Thelast section summarizes my arguments with a plea for a substitution of a stance ofcritique of Indian society and politics for--and outside of--the developmentalist position.Political Development and Organized DemandsThe conservative, institutional-organizational bias in the political developmentstudies framework was reflected in Myrons second book on The Politics of Scarcity, theweakest of his books on India, inferior both to his first on opposition parties and to theone that followed it on the Indian National Congress.Among Myrons principalconcerns in this book, one which persisted into his later works to some extent as well,were the consequences for the modernization process and for public order andeconomic development ofdemands made by organized interests.23 In the politicaldevelopment framework, organized interests made demands that might endangermodernization, public order, and economic development unless they were aggregated bythe political parties and by party systems.These demands constituted problems forthe polity that required proper handling24 or managing,25 which was another way ofreferring to this aggregative-filtering process.Such demands could become quite seriouswhen they took an ethnic form.26In 1987, in their book, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, the Rudolphs took a somewhatdifferent view of these matters from Myron.They examined more closely the internalfunctioning of organized groups or, put another way, groups in the organized sectors ofthe economy, particularly organized labor and organized capital and minimized theirpotential threat to the processes of modernization, public order, and economicdevelopment.They argued to the contrary that the trade unions were so divided,fragmented, and competitive with each other that they lacked the ability to have a major

23Myron Weiner, The Politics of Scarcity: Public Pressure and Political Response in India(Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962), p. 11.24Myron Weiner J oseph LaPalombara, The Impact of Parties on Political Development, inJ oseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner (eds.), Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton, N.J .: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp.399-400.25Weiner and LaPalombara, pp.430-31.26Myron Weiner, Congress Restored: Continuities and Discontinuities in Indian Politics, AsianSurvey, XXII, No. 4 (April, 1982), pp. 351-52.Brass Political Science of Development 7impact on national policy.On the other side, organized capital, operating in arestricted, but protected economic environment, was largely dependent upon governmentand could not and, in fact, did not oppose the thrust of the economic developmentstrategy of import substitution.27 Both organized labor and organized capital, in theRudolphs reckoning, emerged as the weaker parties in a triangular relationship with theIndian state, which had the capacity to prevail over these and other organized interestsnot only because the state was the strongest party, but also because it had won wideacceptance for its claim that it has a special responsibility for nation building andeconomic development,28 in other words, that it had legitimacy that overrode theinterests of organized groups such as labor and capital.In short, the Rudolphs, whilecoining the term weak-strong state for the Indian state, took the view that the state wasstrong enough to prevail against such interests.As I have pointed out elsewhere, Atul Kohli a few years later took a less sanguineview of Indian state capacities, which he thought had been severely eroded during Mrs.Gandhis tenure in office to such an extent that India was now confronted with a crisis ofgovernability.Using Samuel Huntingtons framework and terminology, he argued thatthere had been, in effect, a political decay of Indian institutions and an unwillingness onthe part of government under Indira Gandhis hegemony, to incorporate the growingdemands of power blocs in the polity.Although his book constitutes a considerableindictment of Indira Gandhi and her policies and practices, he nevertheless takes theposition that she perceived - not without some justification - that such moves wouldweaken the Center and thus both national integrity and the state's capacity to steereconomic development.She opted instead for strategies that involved the underminingof democratic institutions,29 including the weakening of her own party, the IndianNational Congress, the premier institution in Indian political life.Adhering closely toHuntingtons argument, while denying any normative suggestion implied by it, hedeplored this dismantling of the Congress and the weakness of other political parties inIndia.Widespread politicization, he remarked, does put a high premium on a politysinstitutional capacity simultaneously to accommodate the resulting demands and topromote socioeconomic development.Well-organized political parties thus becomeespecially crucial.30We have here, despite the differences in emphasis, an essentially congruent set ofarguments about what is important in Indian political development and how thatdevelopment may be endangered.Interest groups, organized or not, present demands thatnaturally proliferate in a heterogeneous society such as Indias that is also undergoingextensive politicization.These demands are presented to the state which, throughoutmost of this period, made the crucial decisions affecting organized interests.Between theinterests and the Indian state stood the Indian National Congress, which had the capacity

27Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, p. 25.28Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, p. 273.29Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 16.30Kohli, Democracy and Discontent, p.30.Brass Political Science of Development 8for two decades to aggregate, accommodate, and incorporate such demands and the powerto deflect and resist them when necessary.After the death of Nehru and during the longperiod of rule by Mrs. Gandhi, the balance shifted in such a way that the institutions,particularly the Congress, that had performed these functions had weakened and nowlacked the capacity to deal effectively with them, thus producing a crisis ofgovernability.That crisis in turn cast doubt on the ability of the Indian state topromote socioeconomic development.Now, what is wrong with all this?As a broad summary statement of what hashappened in India during the past 50 years, it cannot be said that it is wrong.Neither forthat matter can it be said to be true.It is, however, a framework for attaching meaning,significance, and value to sets of processes abstracted from political happenings.Beginning first of all with values, it is transparent--all protestations denying normativepreferences to the contrary notwithstanding--that the state and its capacities to promotemodernization, maintain public order, and promote socioeconomic developmentconstitute the apex value for political scientists of India as well as for the elites who have(mis)governed the country for the past 50 years.Second, it is sufficient for politicalscientists of India simply to mention those processes of modernization andsocioeconomic development to be understood by their colleagues and vaguely understoodby their students, despite the actuality that neither these terms nor their sub-referents,such as secularization, restratification, urbanization, and the like have any kind ofconcrete reality other than those produced by manipulating census data.One can talk, forexample, of urbanization as an aspect of modernization and cite census figures to show itsrate, the sources of the migrating populations, and some of the political results producedby migration of ethnically distinct migrants into an urban metropolis.One then alsoattaches some significance or value to these processes for which summary terms are alsoused, such as rapid or moderate for the rate of change, rural for the source ofmigrants, interethnic conflict for the consequences of migration, and the like.What is wrong with all this is that it is without doubt a conservative, state-supporting politico-moral framework that ignores the lived realities of the Indian people.These concepts are all misguiding. These old concepts and terms not only mislead us, butthey are of no predictive value, which is so highly valued in the modern social sciences.These concepts start from the top.We need to start from the bottom to look at relationsbetween people, which for us as political scientists means especially relations of power.The vast majority of the Indian people have no idea of what is meant by modernization,socioeconomic development, state capacity, and the like.They have specific needs andwants and have to interact with persons in positions of authority in order to attain them.But does not Indian democracy provide the means for those at the bottom to gaininfluence, respect, resources, and power?Is not democracy in fact working in India tothe increasing advantage of the lower orders?Let us see how this question has been takenup in one type of answer to this question of democratic development in India.Brass Political Science of Development 9Democratic DevelopmentWhile denying that their developmental model contained a built-in, ethnocentricbias towards Anglo-American political practices as the end result of politicaldevelopment, there can be no doubt that most of the developmentalists favored such aresult.Further, among India specialists--including Myron, of course--both democraticdevelopment and the relationship between democratic practices and socioeconomicdevelopment have been the central concerns of our research.Here, as elsewhere, therewas a consensus among practitioners in India--the politicians, on the one hand, andpolitical scientists, mainly American, on the other hand--concerning the desirability of asecular, democratic state dedicated to economic development and national unity.31 Thatconsensus, especially on the role of a democratic state in directing economic development,in fact was formed in India as early as the late nineteenth century, at the beginnings ofnationalist thought and political organization.32 While this consensus might seemadmirable from a liberal democratic perspective, it is further evidence of the absence ofdistance between intellectuals and politicians, a distance that is necessary for critique.In place of critique, Myron and other India specialists warned, preached, andcautioned the political elites in India after Independence.Following Shils, our writingswere supposed to enlighten the political elites about the meaning of democracy, itspractices, and its dangerous shoals.33Thus, Myron pointed to the danger that Indiaspolitical elites might, in their search for utopian solutions to Indias vast problems, failto recognize the inevitability of conflict, the arousal of ethnic loyalties, the strugglefor patronage and power, and the essential presence of both political parties andpressure groups in the democratic process.They might feel their plans threatened byall these elements and opt instead for authoritarian solutions.34 While Myron phrasedthese points in neutral terms, they amounted nevertheless to advice to Indias politicalelites.But, at the time Myron wrote these lines, Indias political elites did not need suchadvice, for they had their own preacher and tutor, none other than J awaharlal Nehru, whounderstood all these points and was himself committed to the values and practices ofcontemporary democracy and democratic development.Nehru himself, however, largely escaped critical analysis.He was by far, amongall the leaders of the postcolonial world, the darling of liberal academic political scientistsin the West.Only during the last decade have his ideals and policies come in forincreasingly sharp intellectual critique, mostly from Indian social scientists of thepostmodernist persuasion.However, during virtually the entire period of his political

31Myron Weiner, The Politics of South Asia, in Weiner, Political Change in South Asia, p.39.32J yotirindra Das Gupta, India: Democratic Becoming and Combined Development, in LarryDiamond, et. Al. (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. III: Asia (Boulder, Col.: LynneRienner, 1989), p.59.33Edward Shils, On the Comparative Study of the New States, in Clifford Geertz (ed.), OldSocieties and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: The Free Press, 1963),e.g., p. 8, where Shils envisaged this process of enlightenment as involving direct transmission fromscholars engaged in the comparative study of the new states to the studentsfrom the new states studying inAmerican universities to the enlightenment of opinion and policy there as well; pp. 7-8.34Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, pp. 150-51.Brass Political Science of Development 10dominance after the death of his rival, Sardar Patel, until the fiasco of his handling of thewar with China in 1962, Nehru faced no serious opposition to his rule and his idealseither from within the Indian political process or from intellectuals, though there wassubterranean sentiment amongst the then politically weak militant Hindu nationalistsagainst him.The current critique of Nehrus ideals and policies derives from two sources, oneindigenous, the other once again Western.The first is the political thought, ideas, andpractices of Gandhi, the second is derived from the contemporary postmodernist critiqueof the intellectual apparatus as well as the ideals derived from the Enlightenment and itsenshrinement of Reason as the solution for all social problems, which Nehru embodied.Iwill return to the second critique of both Nehru and the development perspective later.Here, however, it needs to be noted that Gandhi anointed Nehru as Indias prime ministerdespite the fact that he certainly knew that Nehrus political goals and practices wereutterly incompatible with his own.Gandhis thought, ideals, and practices were anti-statist, anti-party, and anti-industrialist.He proposed the disbanding of the IndianNational Congress and the creation of a new political order based on village self-government and rural development. The makers of the Indian Constitution ignored thetotal incompatibility of the two approaches to Indias political future and ignoredGandhis hopes.35 In the nearly 400 articles of the inordinately long Constitution of India,there is only one brief article that refers to the favored form of Gandhian politicalorganization, the village panchayat. Article 40 in the Directive Principles of State Policy--that, in fact, have no directive power--says only that the State shall take steps toorganise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may benecessary to enable them to function as units of self-government.This is not the place to discuss the history of the organization of such panchayatsin India.For purposes of this paper, it is sufficient to note only that they have posed noobstacle whatsoever to the centralization of power, the development of the commandeconomy, and the proliferation of political parties and interest groups that Gandhiopposed.There can be no doubt that here also political development specialists sharedthe same views as the members of the Indian Constituent Assembly, namely, that astrong state structure was essential to Indias development--political, economic, andsocial--and that it was the Gandhian alternative, not the Nehruvian approach, that wasutopian and unrealistic, not to say obscurantist.Although Ralph Retzlaff published a book on Indian village government in 196236and others of us have from time to time commented on the functioning of those systemsof panchayati raj (village self-government) that have been introduced in several states inIndia, the bulk of our writing has focused on the institutions associated with the modernstate and with its democratic development.Weiner and LaPalombara raised questionssuch as whether or not mobilist single-party systems could be compatible with

35Instead, they took the position that the two sets of goals were not incompatible; GranvilleAustin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 48-49.36Ralph Retzlaff, Village Government in India: A Case Study (New York: Asia, 1962).Brass Political Science of Development 11democratic political values37 or whether or not, from the standpoint of long-rangedemocratic political development a bureaucracy subject to party patronage, even to acertain amount of political corruption, is to be preferred to one in which, while it nicelyconforms to the Weberian requisites of a legal-rational authority system, is also by thisvery reason in a position to distort the development of political parties and interestgroups and even to subject them to bureaucratic domination.38 Once again, though statedin neutral academic terms, it is obvious that Myron at least preferred the development ofa multi-party system for India that aggregated group interests and that he was, in effect,saying to Indias political elites that it was more important to nurture these institutionsthan to worry overmuch about political penetration of and corruption in the bureaucracy.Here too Indias political elites needed no such advice as they transformed the Indianpolity into what I have called a corrupt bureaucratic state.Specialists in Indian political development have also repeatedly expressed theirsympathies with the problems faced by Indian political elites in pursuing the variousaspects of the development process.Once again, these sympathetic statements have beenmade in impeccably neutral English social scientific terms, but they cannot be interpretedotherwise than as sympathetic.The special overall problem that India and its politicalelites are said to have faced from the start is the necessity of confronting all thedevelopment problems at once instead of in a gradual sequence, as in the West.As DasGupta has put it, echoing the earlier theoretical development literature on sequences ofpolitical development,39 democratic systems in developing countries have the unenviable(my italics) task of simultaneously and rapidly developing the polity, economy, andsociety.40 The phrasing is important.It is not only an unenviable task, but it is a task,that is, a duty, or, as the American Heritage dictionary puts its, a piece of assignedwork, a difficult or tedious undertaking.Who assigned to Indias political elites this unenviable task?Well, they assignedit to themselves and political development specialists on India also assigned it to them.The consensus remains intact here as well and any critique of the undertaking itself wasfor long absent, though there has been ample critique of measures taken along the way toimplement it or deviate from it.We all reacted with shock and anger, reflecting our deepcommitment to the democratic development process in India, when Indira Gandhitemporarily gave up combined development on the plea that the democratic part of thatdevelopment was undermining social stability and economic development goals and whenshe, instead of pursuing the unenviable task, set out to dismantle the democratic systemof persuasion and replace it with an authoritarian mode of creating and enforcing publicassent.41 But we did not criticize the whole enterprise, not to mention its increasingassociation with another form of development, namely, military development that led to

37Weiner and LaPalombara, p. 425.38Weiner and LaPalombara, p. 434.39Leonard Binder, et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, N. J .:Princeton University Press, 1971).40Das Gupta, p. 66.41Das Gupta, p. 73.Brass Political Science of Development 12Indias first peaceful nuclear explosion under Indira Gandhi and only last year to itsfurther development under the militant Hindu government at Pokhran.That this strivingfor great power status was inherent in the development process from the beginning wasneglected along with its implications for the well being of the Indian peoples.Far from criticizing the whole enterprise of Indias simultaneous development ofsocial, economic, and political resources,42 we heaped praise upon its elites--alwaysexpressed in neutral social scientific terms--for adhering to the path of democraticpolitical development.Das Gupta remarked in 1989, for example, how Indiasdemocratic political development had not been constrained by the slow development ofthe so-called social and economic requisites of democratic being.Indeed, Indiandemocracy in this respect stood as a deliberate act of political defiance of the social andeconomic constraints of underdevelopment.43 The adverbs and adjectives are missingfrom these statements, but they are nonetheless apparent; they were commendably not... constrained and the act of defiance was commendable.Those who have criticized and worried more about Indias political future andhave seen present circumstances as less commendable have, nevertheless, done so fromwithin the same developmentalist perspective.I refer once again to Kohli--with whom Ihave also been bracketed44--who coined in 1990 the term, crisis of governability forIndias political condition in the late 1980s, and asked the question whether India'sdemocratic government [can] simultaneously accommodate conflicting interests andpromote socioeconomic development.45 It is, once again, the unenviable task that Indiaspolitical elites may not, after all, be able to bring off.Well, fifty years have passed.Have they brought it off or not?Whenever weIndia specialists are asked to give an answer to this type of question of assessment of theresults of Indias experiment in so-called simultaneous development, we have what Ihave called elsewhere a canned speech or a canned paper in which we recite theachievements of the Nehruvian planning process, mostly in aggregate or abstract termssuch as the creation of a broad and diversified industrial base, the maintenance of theHindu rate of growth, the absence of famines, the rise of a new urban middle class, andmost of all the maintenance of democratic practices.We then recite the deficiencies:failure to cross the 50 percent literacy line, absence of clean drinking water, absence ofsanitation and hygiene in most of the country, absence of anything that can be calledmedical treatment in most of the country and virtually none that can be called antiseptic,proliferation of urban slums the like of which the world has never before seen, increasedcommunal violence, dowry deaths, and gender discrimination that takes the form ofextremely low literacy rates for women, victimization of females in the family with regardto provision of food and medical facilities, persistence of caste disabilities, and on and on.

42Das Gupta, p.93.43Das Gupta, p. 95.44Stuart Corbridge, Federalism, Hindu Nationalism and Mythologies of Governance in ModernIndia, in Graham Smith (ed.), Federalism: The Multiethnic Challenge(London: Longman, 1995), pp.102, 111-12, 116.45Kohli, p. ix.Brass Political Science of Development 13As the reader will note, I wax more eloquently on the latter set of issues than on theformer, but most of my colleagues manage to maintain a more perfect equilibrium in theircanned articles and speeches.In fact, I have been accused of being a prophet of doom and gloom, of painting apicture of an India heading seamlessly towards catastrophe, as one of my critics recentlyput it.What I want to say here and now, however, is that India is not heading towardscatastrophe: India is a living catastrophe and its people, including its intellectuals, knowit.But that line will get us nowhere but into endless, unsolvable arguments.Moreimportant, from an analytical rather than a polemical point of view, I want to say thatthis developmentalist perspective, this endless talk about simultaneous development, thisgrand celebration of Indian democracy is an intellectual dead end that has us going roundin circles like this all the time.We have all been caught in it and cannot seem to get out ofit.I want to propose how to get out of it: to show how Myrons best work points away out and how other kinds of questions may be asked that will lead us out of this deadend.However, I want first to consider another set of terms that I have spotted trottingalong beside us that have led us still further astray.Governance and GovernabilityMuch of the writing about India by India specialists has been concerned with thequestion of governance.It is a curious word to apply to a state deemed democratic.We do not use it much in the United States where mostly the common term government isused, which is sometimes called good as in good government, though we rarely use theopposite term, bad government.When we say good government, we usually mean agovernment that is free of the taint of corruption, governs--that is, administers--thegovernment efficiently and convinces a majority of the people that it does so in thepublic interest whatever its specific policy goals.The term govern is more often usedwith reference to multi-party systems, where the question is sometimes raised whether ornot a particular combination of parties may be able to govern effectively or not.Thatusage of the term also became quite prominent in India after--and ever since--the results ofthe 1967 General Elections, as a consequence of which the Congress lost its majority atthe Center and in half the Indian states, introducing a period of unstable coalitiongovernments in many of them.It has also been used by political analysts in India withreference to Congress rule at the Center both before and after the 1967 elections.Forexample, one writer, remarking upon the diversity of interests contained within theCongress, thought it explained why the Congress Party cannot adopt rational policies orgovern effectively; it has to contend all the time against itself.46 Finally, it has also beenused in the sense of self versus other forms of governance, as in self-government forIndia after British rule and, in India itself after Independence, in the sense of restoration of

46J . D. Sethi, India in Crisis (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), p. 55.Brass Political Science of Development 14self-governance to federal units whose government has been taken over by the Center fora time, that is, restoration of its own governance.47When talking about India, however, the terms governance, govern, andgovernability convey a much broader range of concerns.It is used more often in theconventional meanings of the term, that is, to rule, control, direct, steer, regulate,determine, and/or restrain.Thus, Indians use the term govern and governance to refer toBritish rule in India, which did all of those things.However, like so many other thingsthat were carried over from British authoritarian rule, the idea of governance was alsocarried over into the new Indian democracy along with its opposite, namely, thepossibility that the country or its parts, that is, the former provinces--now states--of thecountry might be misgoverned or mismanaged.This possibility was very much in theminds of members of the Constituent Assembly, among whom the fear of disorder wasvery prominent and who associated the notion of disorder with these terms,mismanagement and misgovernance. As I have shown elsewhere, that fear was used tojustify the inclusion in the Indian Constitution of the right to make use of extensiveemergency powers, including the imposition of what is called Presidents Rule upon anystate whose government failed to maintain law and order.48Dua, among others, has noted that Indias political leaders in the ConstituentAssembly in fact borrowed the concept of emergency governance from the Governmentof India Act of 1935.49 But it was not just disorder that these political elites feared, butespecially a particular type, that which might threaten the integrity and unity of theIndian Union.50 Provisions for emergency governance were justified because disorder ormisgovernance might lead to such a breakdown of order that Indias territorial statehooditself might be endangered.Such concerns about misgovernment and mismanagementcould only have reflected another kind of continuity between the new governing elites andthe former British rulers, namely, an attitude of distrust of the ordinary politicians of thecountry and a lack of faith in the ability of a mostly newly franchised population to checkthe misbehavior of their elected governors.There is also built into the concept of governance in India the underlying fear thatIndia itself is so big and heterogeneous that it might in fact be impossible to governeffectively at all, a fear unstated but presumably felt by its Constitution-makers andasserted openly by foreign specialists on Indian politics.It is sometimes argued also thatseveral of Indias states are themselves too large and heterogeneous to be governed

47Gould, p. 634.48Paul R. Brass, The Strong State and the Fear of Disorder. In Francine Frankel (ed.),Democracy and Social Transformation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).For example,in the debate on these issues, one of the very few opponents in the Assembly of the adoption of extremeemergency powers in the Constitution remarked: Articles 275 and 276 give the Central Executive andParliament all the power that can reasonably be conferred on them in order to enable them to see that lawand order do not break down in the country, or that misgovernment [my italics] in any part of India is notcarried to such lengths as to jeopardise the maintenance of law and order.It is not necessary to go anyfurther. [Pandit Hirday Nath Kunzru in India, Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report, vol. IX(J uly 30, 1949 to September 18, 1949) (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1967), p. 156.49Dua, p. 5.50Dua, p. 11.Brass Political Science of Development 15effectively and efficiently by a single government and should, therefore, be split up intomuch smaller units.51The most striking assertion of the question of whether or not India as a wholecould be governed at all was made by Selig Harrison in 1960.52It has been reassertedmost recently by Kohli who has remarked that the area that is now identified as Indiawas never easy to govern and has in recent years, in fact, become difficult to govern.53However, unlike Harrison, who was raising the underlying fear of early Indian nationaliststhat the country might disintegrate, Kohli means by govern, the states capacity ...simultaneously to promote development and to accommodate diverse interests,54 thesimultaneous development question once again.He argues even more strongly that thegreat fear of disorder of the Indian constitution-makers has materialized, that politicalorder in contemporary India has, in fact, broken down.55It needs to be noted also that the way in which the term governance is used inthe literature on Indian politics separates it from democracy.Thus, Manor refers to thepolitical awakening that has occurred in recent years among India s disadvantagedgroups, which he argues has made India both a more genuine democracy and a moredifficult country to govern. Manor means by the latter that conflicts have become moredifficult to manage.What has made matters especially difficult is that, as thisdemocratic awakening has taken place, political decay of Indias principal politicalinstitutions, those of the state as well as the Congress, has taken place.56 Huntingtonsshadow is here again, obviously, with his formula for democracy as a regime defined bythe autonomy of its institutions from social forces and, as well, his formula for disasterarising from the imbalance between participation/social mobilization andinstitutionalization.57This formula, of course, eliminates the self from governance,ignores the possibility that self-governance may only become possible through politicaldisorder, the dismantling ofinstitutions, the displacing of old political elites by new ones,and the articulation of a new political formula that better reflects the aspirations of theformerly disadvantaged.This formula also eliminates the human and the humane, as Kothari has put itin his poignant and powerful essay, from governance.Kothari argues in a paradoxicalformulation that not only in India, but globally, governance has been usurped bygovernments and further that governments have been taken over by corporate interestsand the military-technocratic order, and by the ideology of national interest and national

51E.g., see V. M. Dandekar, Unitary Elements in a Federal Constitution, EPW, XXII, No. 44(October 31, 1987), 1870.52Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton, N. J .: Princeton UniversityPress, 1960).53Kohli, p. 3.54Kohli, p. 5.55Kohli, p. 14.56J ames Manor, Ethnicity and Politics in India, International Affairs, LXXII, No. 3 (1996),pp.471-72.57Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1969).Brass Political Science of Development 16security.58 Although the first part of the statement is paradoxical, it is as clear as can beand means what I have just said, that the self, meaning the people,has been taken outof the term governance, and, further, that governments no longer rule humanely in theinterests of the people but in the interests of multi-national corporations in which thegood society has become one in which happiness is identified with possession andutilization of the latest technological devices in a world made safe for those who possesand use them by a state whose primary concern is not even governance but the mereprotection of the interests and safety of its citizens, especially of its privileged citizens.India, of course, was not part of the inner circle of such states when Kothari wrote theselines, but rather was at once a victim of the new global order and an increasingly eagerparticipant in it, creating its own internal victims among the poor and disadvantaged, thatis, the vast majority of its own citizens.In this new world order, it seems, there are reallyno citizens, only beneficiaries and victims, those with influence and those with none.Kotharis call is for a return to humane governance, including a concern forhuman rights and ethical imperatives, for the recovery of the human, the good, and thejust.59 In restoring such a conception and form of government, the intellectuals have arole to play, which includes exposing misgovernance and oppression, creating aknowledge base for transformative politics and democratic governance, and identifyingthemselves with the victims of history and with the democratic movement waged ontheir behalf. Instead of playing the role of rationalisers and legitimisers of existingpolitical forms, presenting a vision of the future derived from developmentalistperspectives for the benefit of the people, their role should be to listen to the people andbuild that knowledge base from what they themselves hear from the people.60I will come back to the issues raised by Kothari in a moment, but will say nowonly that Kothari too has been caught in the discursive framework of the term,governance, which presumes an abstract entity above the people that will somehowgovern better, that is, more humanely, in the interests of the people.For reasons thatwill, I hope, become clear in a moment, I do not believe that there can be any such form ofgovernance.However, I want to refer first to another source for the contemporary usage of theterm, govern, namely elite theory and the arguments that have surrounded it.Inclassical elite theory associated with Mosca, Michels, and to a considerable extentLasswell as well, democracy cannot exist in reality.The idea of democracy itself ismerely a political formula in the modern age that hides the reality that all large-scaleorganizations, including the state and political parties that vie for power within it, areoligarchies controlled by elites who govern in the name of the people.Those elites cannotbe replaced by the people, by any genuine form of self-rule, but only by counter-elites.Even when the ruling elites are overthrown in the course of a mass revolutionarymovement, the end result can only be the reestablishment of some form of elite rule or

58Rajni Kothari, State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance (Delhi: Ajanta,1989), p. 1.59Kothari, p. 2.60Kothari, pp. 13-14.Brass Political Science of Development 17governance.The reigning democratic theory in contemporary American political scienceassociated with the name of Robert Dahl departs from this theory only to the extent ofdenying the inevitability and the reality in the United States of the argument that a singleelite always rules.Dahl instead argues that the struggle of interests and parties in theUnited States produces a pluralist rather than an elitist distribution of power.61 ButDahls polyarchal democracy remains itself an elitist form of rule in which theparticipation of the people consists primarily in the act of voting.62It is fully consistentwith the Schumpeterian redefinition of modern democracy as rule by elected elites.Elite theory in its early phase constituted a sharp critique of then existing regimesthat claimed to be democratic.In its contemporary form, however, it constitutes ajustification for such regimes.In neither form is elite theory fully adequate tocomprehend the functioning of contemporary regimes of symbol manipulation in societieswhose lives are controlled and disciplined in great detail by multi-national corporationsrather than by governments, such as the United States, or of corrupt bureaucraticdevelopmentalist regimes such as Indias.There remain nevertheless several aspects ofearly--not late elite theory--that remain superior to the developmentalist paradigm as wellas to critiques of it such as Kotharis.First is the very recognition that there is aninevitable tendency for elites to emerge in all societies, in all social movements, in allformal organizations, and in the agencies of the state themselves.Second is therecognition that elites and governments rule, govern under the guise of a politicalformula in which they may or may not themselves believe, but which provides ajustification for their rule that sustains them in power as long as most of the peoplebelieve in it.Third is the notion that political struggle in modern regimes that operateunder the political formula of liberal democracy is a continuous engagement of socialforces.If we apply this scheme in its bare bones to India, one can say with a fair degreeof summary accuracy that, in the early years after Independence--throughout the Nehruperiod, in fact--India was ruled by an upper class, upper caste elite whose politicalformula was the very developmentalist ideology that I have been discussing so far in thispaper.During those years, the struggle of social forces was contained primarily within aruling class of westernized professional persons, commercial and industrial elements,and ex-landlord and upper peasant groups.Under the cover of the political formula,persons from these classes gained control over most of the instruments of governance atthe Center and in the states, particularly the ministries, departments, and public sectorundertakings, which they gradually converted into increasingly bountiful sources ofcorrupt income.In the meantime, as we all know, what is called the basic human needs ofthe people were disregarded, the institutions that sustained this plunder began to collapse,and the funds to continue to sustain them were depleted.As the state and its agencies and agents became more and more corrupt and self-serving, gradually also new social forces containing in their midst new sets of elites began

61Citation is from the characterization of Dahls concept of power in Stewart R. Clegg,Frameworks of Power (London: Sage, 1989), p. 53.62Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).Brass Political Science of Development 18to challenge the old order, but not its corrupt foundations in which they all wish to shareor control themselves or divide more equitably.Simultaneously also, as the oldinstitutions declined and the old elites lost their bases of power, so did the politicalformula under which they governed, whose key terms were modernization, development,secularism, and socialism.In their place, the ascendant political formula contains theterms Hindu nation, respect for the (Hindu) faith of the people, unification of the (Hindu)nation, abandonment of policies of appeasement of minorities, honesty and integrity ingovernment, law and order, and respect for India in the world of nations.Some of theseterms are carry-overs that were contained within the old political formula, some aredistortions of it, some are outrageously false in their implications, though widely believed(e.g., that BJ P politicians are less corrupt than others).But those who have articulatedthe new political formula themselves come predominantly from the elites that dominatedIndia during the Nehru period.On the other side, the rising social forces and the eliteswithin them adhere to elements of the old political formula to which they have added thedemands for equality, economic betterment of the lower castes and classes, and rule bythe real majority (thebahujan in the party called the Bahujan Samaj Party).These rising castes and classes and social forces are challenging in India a part ofthe wider notion of governance: who can govern; what governing is; what or who isgoverned.63 The militant Hindus, however, are challenging all three parts of thisparticular statement of governance.The rising backward and lower caste movements aresaying: you Brahmans and other upper castes are not going to govern us any longer; weare now going to govern.But they have no notion of what governing is or what orwho is governed.The militant Hindu politicians, on the other hand, are saying: you pseudo-secularists and appeasers of minorities are not going to govern any longer; only those whodeclare themselves to be Hindus are going to govern.They are also saying that we knowbetter what governing is, that is, how to govern:64 we will rule honestly, impartially,without discrimination among persons and groups, all of whom are to be included in thegreat Hindu family, and we will maintain law and order, in respect to all of which youothers have failed at the risk of critically endangering the country and the nation.Theyare also redefining what or who is governed.The what is a united India, free from theconflicts and disorders among its peoples that have divided it till now.The who is theundivided Hindu nation that is to include Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, all Hindu castes andclasses and sects, not that composite mixture of cultures that formed the nation of thepseudo-secularists.It should be obvious, by the very fact that it contains answers to all threequestions while the lower and backward caste parties and movements do not, that themilitant Hindu response is potentially the more powerful and persuasive one.The formeroffers only the spoils from the existing state apparatus to those previously denied access

63Colin Gordon, Government Rationality: An Introduction, in Graham Burchell, et al., TheFoucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with MichelFoucault (London: Harvester, 1991), p.3.64Gordon, p. 7.Brass Political Science of Development 19to them.The latter offers a vision of a future great India--never mind how dishonest,pathological, and dangerous to some social forces in India, to its neighbors, and to othersit may be--that has a considerable appeal to the still-dominant classes in society, theupper classes and castes, and to a part of the middle classes and castes as well.Both movements in contemporary India, that of the lower classses and castes, andthat of the militant Hindus, however, are participating in a critique of the political orderthat was created by Nehru and the Congress in the first two decades of Indianindependence and that has been falling apart for the past 25 years.They are joined in thiscritique by several of the most respected intellectuals in India as well, such as AshishNandy and T. N. Madan.This critique responds to another question, namely, how notto be governed, that is to say, how not to be governed like that [italics in original], bythat, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and bymeans of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them.65The answers to the how not to be governed questions are again different fromthe side of the lower classes and castes and from the militant Hindus.That from theformer has already been partly noted above: we will not be governed by you upper castepeople as if we were inferior beings; we will not accept the leavings from your tables anylonger; we will have our share and our rights.And, we will not have our share and ourrights as benevolent gifts from you; we will take them through our own efforts and wewill take them from you, if necessary.However, the parties representing these socialforces are not rejecting the old political formula of developmentalism and secularism.They cannot reject developmentalism because there is no other way open to them in thisland without opportunities for the disadvantaged outside of government.They cannotreject secularism because it is only through coalition among diverse castes andcommunities, including especially Muslims, that they can achieve control overgovernment and government resources.The militant Hindu response to the question how not to be governed is moreencompassing.It is in some ways also more radical, not in the Lefts sense of radical,but in the sense of distancing from the old political formula.Militant Hindus share many,if not most, of the original objectives of Nehru and the Congress.They want to build anew India that is industrialized, technologically modernized, and militarily powerfulenough to overawe its neighbors in South Asia, to equalize its position in relation toChina, and to gain the respect of the Western industrial powers.They even claim to besecular--and they are in a different, sophistical way: once all Indians declare themselves tobe politically Hindu, all will be treated in the same way.Those who do not accept thepolitical Hindu designation (particularly Muslims and Christians) are to be treated as, ineffect, non-Indians, non-citizens, who should go somewhere else, to Pakistan or toEngland.But there is also a more radical critique of the old political formula that comesfrom some of Indias intellectuals and has been articulated also by Ronald Inden.That

65Michel Foucault, What is Critique? in The Politics of Truth, ed. By Sylvre Lotringer andLysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 28.Brass Political Science of Development 20critique rejects lock, stock, and barrel the entire developmentalist perspective and thesecular political framework as well.However, while the critique is powerful, theprescriptions are vacuous.It offers no sensible political alternatives beyond such phrasesas the recovery of religious tolerance, respect for the indigenous values and faiths of thepeople, and the like. Such intellectual constructions have no power to confront themilitant Hindu ideology, whose leaders are as much or more in touch with the indigenousvalues and faiths of the people and who know how to manipulate them to their politicaladvantage.For those who wish to challenge the old order and the old political formulawithout falling into the net of the BJ P and its family of militant Hindu organizations,something more is needed.Neither pleas for humane governance nor for respect for thevalues and beliefs of the ordinary people of India can offer much of political substance.Resistance is called for, but resistance to what? Against whom? How?And what shouldbe the role of intellectuals in India and the West who are sympathetic to the need forresistance.The greatest failing of the developmentalist/institutionalist approach is that itutterly lacks any basis for critique.Its last vestiges need to be utterly disowned anddiscarded.It has contributed in its own way to the catastrophe that is India today.Nor does the classical elite theory outlined above take us far enough.We need aframework for the analysis of the relations of power in Indian society and of theinterrelations of state and society.We need to build apolitical ethnography, that is, anethnography of power relations in Indian society and an ethnography of the Indian state.Such an ethnography can be built only from empirical observation of Indian realities, notfrom developmentalist or anti-developmentalist abstractions.We need to begin with theother side of our canned speeches about Indian development and Indian democracy.So, let me present a list of starters.Poverty is first, but not poverty as anabstraction, not poverty as a counting of the numbers of people below an imaginary line--even if that line is constructed and commented upon by a radical theorist such as AmartyaSen--but poverty as a way of life that one cannot escape and that dramatically constrainsones abilities and relations with the non-poor.Second, and associated with poverty,comes illiteracy: continuing, increasing illiteracy that makes a mockery of the idea ofequality in Indian society, especially for women whose illiteracy rates are very highindeed.Third, comes inequality itself: the persistence at all levels of Indian society--outside the most Westernized--of relationships that emphasize difference and deferenceof the low to the high.Fourth, comes violence: from the violence of everyday life againstwomen in the family to the violence against the poor and other unprotected personsperpetrated by the police in police stations and in the countryside to the criminal violenceof so-called Hindu-Muslim riots, which are often in fact pogroms against Muslims inwhich the police are participants or quiet bystanders.Fifth, comes corruption: pervasive,systematic, graded, corrosive of all institutions and agencies in Indian society in which allare implicated, in which all participate from the lowest to the highest in Indian society.Sixth, and related to all the above, the continued diversion of the resources of the countryBrass Political Science of Development 21from any serious attempt to satisfy the basic human needs of the population to big dams,nuclear power plants, military projects, and nuclear weapons.One needs also to open ones eyes to what denial of the basic human needs of thispopulation approaching one billion means.One has to keep before ones eyes what onesees every day in India and that one tends to forget almost instantly as soon as one settlesinto the seats of the departing flights: people living in garbage dumps on the outskirts ofcities from which they scavenge their food and clothing; children lying listlessly on theground outside rural medical dispensaries where they have come because they have a fluor stomach ailment or perhaps something more serious and life-threatening, their bodiescovered with flies from head to toe and no one there or interested in or capable ofattending to them; peasants tilling tiny plots of land insufficient to feed their families,some of them still tied in relations of bonded labor to those with larger landholdings;police raising their lathis against bicycle rickshaw drivers sweltering in unbearable heat tobeat them because they have made some minor traffic error; old Muslim men walking up ahill to tell the mufti at the end of riot curfew how they were beaten by police, their beardsgrabbed and pulled, how they have lost sons in the riots; women telling their stories ofhusbands, sons, and brothers killed in the same riots; men sitting listlessly in governmentoffices doing absolutely nothing hour after hour, day after day; the rich, privileged, andpowerful sitting comfortably in their new bungalows, their five-star hotel suites, theirrestaurants, oblivious to all the above and prepared to deny that any of it actually existsin their country; politicians moving about with guns in their holsters beneath their kurtas,with shadows and bodyguards; ministers in the government moving about in retinues ofcars, accompanied by smart-stepping black cats who rush out to open their doors andsurround them with their automatic rifles until they are safely inside their hugebungalows.I have many other such images in my minds eye gathered over 38 years ofpersonal observation, some of them too noisome to mention in print, which the phraseabsence of sanitation does not capture even euphemistically.To refer to such things ina scholarly paper is to immediately elicit the following responses: Mother India, draininspectors report, what about conditions in the U.S.A.? You have spent too much timein Uttar Pradesh.66Or simply silence.But I am not interested in the shock value of these images for their own sake, butrather as a spur to new research on India that carries forward some of the empiricalmethods of Myron to myriad areas yet untouched, but with the intellectual baggage ofdevelopment theory, the institutional approach to Indian politics, and the fulsome praiseof Indian democracy banished from the field or at least to some reservation where itmay be preserved as an example of an outmoded practice.Let me now, therefore, refer to

66This last one needs to be answered here once and for all.My answer is as follows.First, U. P.does, in fact, stand for India in several respects: 1) it is in India and could not be anywhere else; 2) it is thelargest political unit in India; 3) the living conditions of most of its people are at approximately the samelevel as the rest of north India and parts of eastern India as well; 4) although living conditions in someother parts of India are somewhat better in some respects, they are not so much better anywhere as to setthem so far apart from U. P.as to place them in some other world.Further, I have done research andtravelled in other parts of India as well, especially Bihar where I did research off and on for about ten years,Punjab, Gujarat, and Madras.Brass Political Science of Development 22what we have learned from Myrons life work in India, what remains of lasting and, Ibelieve, of permanent value, and how Myrons methods may be turned in differentdirections to serve other purposes.MethodsMyrons principal method of research was the in-depth personal interview, atwhich he was a master.I know of his mastery not only because of the reports of hisinterviews that he has included in some of his work, but from personal observation of hisconversations over the years with others, which themselves could sometimes turn intointerviews.Myrons questions were precise, searching, probing, so penetrating that hisrespondent or the person with whom he was in dialogue might break out into a sweat.Heintruded frequently into his respondents responses, peppering them with questions.My own methods were quite different from Myrons in this regard, but I and most of usIndia specialists here--and now my former students as well--have followed in his path ofusing in-depth personal interviews as the primary source of political knowledge of India.Myrons use of his interview materials and, associated with interviews, personalobservations over the years changed somewhat.In his earlier work, the interviews weremostly used as footnoted source materials in the preparation of coherent and factuallyaccurate accounts of events.Sometimes also he included extracts from his field notes aspart of his narrative accounts.In some of his middle and later work, however, especiallyin Sons of the Soil and The Child and the State, he published long excerpts from hisinterviews that conveyed the feelings and point of view of his respondents.In the case ofSons of the Soil, his interviews brought to life the quality of the interactions betweencultural groups in conflict with each other, the cultural values they expressed, theprejudices they harbored, and the identities they felt.These interviews addedauthenticity to his accounts and to his efforts to explain events and movements.In The Child and the State, an even more significant departure from his earliestwork in several respects, Myron added photographs to supplement his interviews.67Insofar as the interviews are concerned, however, there are two other major differencesbetween the ones reported here and in his other work. One is Myrons own presence inthem.Myron was also present in his earlier interviews, but his presence here isdifferent, almost blatant.In Sons of the Soil, he listened sympathetically to hisrespondents and did not challenge them.In The Child and the State--and this is thesecond difference--he challenged his respondents, contradicted them, even humiliatedthem by demonstrating to them their own ignorance of their own responsibilities and thelaws governing their duties.In short, Myron was personally involved in an issue onwhich he had strong feelings and it came out in his questions and his responses to answersthat he knew to be false.

67Which, however, like most photographs of India--especially those in Kodachrome--belie what wewish to convey.In Myrons black-and-white photographs, smiling, happy-looking children apparentlyenjoying their work in stark contrast to Myrons accounts of the conditions under which so many of themworked, and oblivious to the deprivations--particularly of education--from which they suffered or wouldsuffer in future because of their work.Brass Political Science of Development 23From the beginning, Myron believed that, in work in developing countries,anthropological methods were appropriate for political science research.However,Myron adapted the depth interview technique to his own purposes.He was not engagedin thick description, for he was always on the move from person to person and place toplace asking--epistemologically speaking--one question over and over again: Why?Hesought causes by asking clear, usually precise questions (though some of them that arosefrom the developmentalist perspective were not really answerable).These whyquestions are interlaced throughout his books and articles, from the first to the last,whether or not he is addressing interview respondents or a theoretical problem or puzzleto be solved through a survey of comparative conditions in other parts of the world or indifferent parts of India.Why does India have a multi-party system?Why have thereactions to migrants been more acutely hostile and nativist in some regions than inothers, and toward some but not all migrants?68 Why did government commissionsreviewing child labor and education policies as recently as 1985-1986 not call forcompulsory education or for legislation to abolish child labor?69Myron did not ask why questions only or even usually to elicit attitudes.Most of the time, he was seeking factual, testable answers.The answers he received wereusually tested against comparative experience.If a respondent or the documentaryevidence gave a particular answer, Myrons next question to himself was: Does this holdup elsewhere?Myron sometimes also asked how and what questions, but mostly toelicit further facts that could be used to answer the why questions.Myron hadcomplete faith in causal analysis and the ability of the comparative method of J ohn StuartMill--as filtered through into contemporary political science--to find true answers toprecise questions.Since Harold Lasswells famous little book, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How,was published many years ago, many political scientists have taken the title of that bookas covering all the questions that might be appropriately asked to find out all we need orwant to know about political behavior.I have, however, just realized as I wrote theprevious sentence that the why question is not contained in the title.Yet, the secondsentence of the book also contains the statement: The science of politics statesconditions.And, on p. 207, I find the following statement.The scientific mode of thinking proceeds by formulating atheoretical model of how [italics mine] selected factors condition oneanother, and confronts the theory with observable reality. [Lasswellsquotation marks.]70What is the difference?I am going to pay less attention to the Who, What, andWhen for purposes of this paper, though those words also have epistemological

68Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton, N. J .:Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 14.69Myron Weiner, The Child and the State in India: Child Labor and Education Policy inComparative Perspective. (Princeton, N. J .: Princeton University Press), p. 5.70Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (With Postscript (1958) (New York:Meridian Books, 1958).Brass Political Science of Development 24significance insofar as they provide the reality that we describe to answer the why orthe how questions.But does not the statement that the science of politics states conditionseliminate the difference between the why and the how?Do we not know whyonce we know how things happen?To some extent the statement does blur thedifference, but the processes of discovery are entirely different.The why questionseeks universal answers to precise questions for which answers are provided in eitherstraightforward, if, then propositions or in probabilistic statements.The questions, themethods, and the answers are abstracted from the richness of reality, refined toencompass only a small part of it, that part that is amenable to answer through existingscientific methods.The how question focuses on processes, engagements of forces,manipulation of symbols, and seeks full comprehension of a reality that includesobservable behavior as well as practices that are partly observable, partly hidden from theview even of the actors whose behavior we observe, who often know not what they do,that is, who are not conscious of the conditions and constraints71 upon their ownpractices.Though the two methods are different in most respects, they do have anepistemological meeting point, at which Lasswells definition of the science of politics asthe stating of conditions becomes apposite.That point is where the how analyst has toanswer the question: is the process you describe universally applicable?If not, whyshould I listen to you?The answer may then be: the process I describe is a necessary,but not sufficient condition or it is necessary and sufficient or it is neither.The howanswer then may or may not become a why answer.Such and such an outcome will,may, or may not happen when such and such conditions are/are not present.But the process of discovery, as I said, is different: more holistic than partial,oriented to process more than comparison (which is not disregarded, but reserved forafterwards), and more attentive to the responses people give to questions rather than tohow satisfactorily they respond to a search for specific answers to the interviewersquestions.Though I fully acknowledge my debt to Myron and his interview methods, Iam in effect saying that, over the years, I have adapted it more and more to the howquestion rather than to the why question.I still ask why did such and such an eventhappen, but I have become more and more interested in the how as well as in anotherquestion that I will discuss in a moment.But first, I must note that there is another kind of what question that comesinto the picture here, a different what from Lasswells.By what, Lasswell meantmaterial and ideal benefits that accrued to the influential through politics.There isanother kind of what question that turns into a how question that I ask frequently inmy interviews.In preference to saying why did such and such an event happen here--though I repeat, I also continue to do that--I say, simply, what happened here?That now takes me to a further kind of methodological issue that Myron did notunderstand or appreciate when I first raised it; in fact, he was nonplused by what I was

71Gordon, p.7.Brass Political Science of Development 25doing. Instead of taking the answers I got to the questions I raised and eliminating thenon-factual, the ignorant, the irrelevant, and the idiotic to find the right answer, the realexplanation, I decided to listen to and analyze for their own sake all the rubbish that wasconveyed to me in these interviews.I then moved a step further and sought to relate theanswers that were given to me to the realities of power relations in urban, small town,and rural areas of Uttar Pradesh that I have been visiting for the past 38 years to arrive ata set of statements about riotous violence, including Hindu-Muslim violence.72I alsoextended the analysis to reflect upon the uses of such incidents of violence for broaderpurposes in the Indian political system.That led me finally to the question of whether ornot there was a kind of hegemonic discourse that pervaded Indian politics that emergedfrom the contested meanings of the violent events that I analyzed that in turn contributedto the persistence of such violence.There were several other steps along the way that Iwill not go into here that brought me finally to the epistemological question that I amraising, namely, the meaning of explanation itself, the uses that social scientists andpoliticians and the media and the public make of the answers to the why questions.My own answer to this last question surprised me and I came to it slowly,cautiously, and with a certain amount of doubt.The answer that I have with morecertainty now come to accept is that explanation in the social sciences cannot be neutral,objective, value-free.That in itself is not a new argument, but there are furtherimplications to it.The first is that explanation implicates the social scientists as well asthe politicians, the journalists, and ordinary citizens on one side or another of the greatissues of the times, involves them either in maintaining the or a status quo or in taking astance against it.Perhaps this is what Sartre meant when he said that you are either forthe revolution or against it.But, there is one further implication that I think is a newargument, namely, that the very act of explanation contributes to the persistence of thesocial problems analyzed.Examples?The authorities, politicians, the media, the intellectual public, ordinarycitizens, and last in the picture, social scientists and historians, have all been implicatedone way or another for the past 150 years or more in the creation and persistence of thecommunal discourse that divides the vast Indian population into two large, more or lessunited or potentially unitable, hostile, and conflict-prone communities, Hindus andMuslims.The latter part of the statement itself is one explanation of the violence thathas been endemic between Hindus and Muslims off and on, with greater or lesserintensity, in different parts of the subcontinent for nearly two centuries.What I amsaying is certainly not that. I argued against that position years ago.What I am sayingnow is that this communal discourse itself plays a major role in the persistence of Hindu-Muslim violence, that it has been creating what it analyzes.Moreover, it is a pernicioussystem of talk that has been created that has parallels elsewhere in the world, whoseconsequences, if one takes the argument far enough, can be horrendous.

72These remarks about my own recent work refer to Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in theRepresentation of Collective Violence (Princeton, N. J .: Princeton University Press, 1997); Riots andPogroms (London and New York: Macmillan and NYU Press, 1996); and my book nearing completion onThe Production of Hindu-Muslim Communal Violence in Contemporary India.Brass Political Science of Development 26Here my answer begins to turn into a response to a why question that can nowbe phrased as: Why does Hindu-Muslim violence persist in India?But it is a differentkind of answer to a question that Ashutosh Varshney, using Myrons methods, has comeup with.Like Myron, he asks: Why here and not there, why in this city and not thatcity, both of which share characteristics that are as close as can be, with the mainexception that communal violence is present in one and not the other?AlthoughVarshney makes a persuasive case for his answers to the why question, hisexplanations fit into a different kind of program from mine.Furthermore, his answersultimately are quite simplistic.Varshney concludes, in his forthcoming book,73 with an argument that appears tobe a mirror image of my own. I say that the communal discourse pervades large parts ofIndia, particularly the north, and that there are certain sites in the country where Hindu-Muslim communal violence is endemic.In those sites, I have asked not only why this isthe case, but how riots happen.I have discovered that, in such sites, what I callinstitutionalized riot systems exist that operate under the cover of the communaldiscourse.Varshney, using Myrons comparative method, discovers that, in those citieswhere Hindu-Muslim riots do not occur, there are institutionalized peace systems.Itwould seem, therefore, that Varshney has confirmed my own findings and phrased themin causal terms, in if-then propositions, in general statements, to wit: where riots areendemic, institutionalized riot systems exist, which cause them; where riots do not occur,institutionalized peace systems exist, which prevent them.There are further elaborationsof Varshneys arguments that I will not go into here, but their simplistic character arisesfrom the naive belief that the development of intercommunal linkages between communalgroups can really prevent riots.I will not speculate here on the policy implications of hisarguments except to say that they present India in a much better light than does my work,make the problems of violence seem much less serious than does my work, and fail toidentify clearly and precisely the principal actors, agents, and institutions that areresponsible for the perpetration of communal violence and the uses to which suchviolence is put.74This is where the how answer differs from the why answer.I describe howriots happen and how the communal discourse provides cover for them, the uses to whichthey are put, and especially the uses of the explanations for them that are given after thefact as well as the contribution of such explanations to the persistence of communalviolence.I say that where such systems of violence and such discourses exist side byside, there is grave danger of corrosion of the entire social order, which cannot be headedoff by saying that the problem only manifests itself here and not there and, further, thatthe dangers include--but do not necessarily or inevitably produce--holocaust, civil war,

73Ashutosh Varshney, Civic Life and Ethnic Conflict: Hi