Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society
Abstract
Civil Society as a conceptual category across different disciplines and ideological and theoretical frameworks has enjoyed an acceptability that no other concept has in the recent past. In response to what could, perhaps, be referred to as the post-euphoric versions of the civil society, scholars across theoretical dispositions began to look for the critical limits of posturing core issues of democracy through the prism of civil society. It is in this context that Partha Chatterjee has made one of the most important interventions by opposing the idea of civil society to that of political society. Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society critically unpacks the concept of political society, which was formulated as a response to the idea of civil society in a postcolonial context. The volume addresses the theoretical issues of political society through a number of detailed case studies from across India: Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, Delhi and Maharashtra. These case studies, combined with a sharp focus on the concept of political society, provide those interested in democracy and its changing patterns in India with an indispensable collection of works, brought together in their common pursuit to highlight the limitations with different core concepts that Chatterjee has formulated. Centred around five themes the relation between the civil and the political; the role of middlemen and their impact on mobility of the subaltern groups; elites and leadership; the fragmentation and intra-subaltern conflicts and its implications for subaltern agency; and finally the idea of moral claims and moral community this volume re-frames issues of democracy and agency in India within a wider scope than has ever before been published, and gathers ideas from some of the foremost scholars in the field. The volume concludes with a rejoinder from Partha Chatterjee.
... Still, his framework (even allowing for modifications over the years) has opened up several lines of critique (see Gudavarthy 2014;Hart 2015). Most problematically, Chatterjee overstates the binary separation of civil and political societies and underplays their interconnectivity in terms, for example, of how modern elites routinely break laws to their own advantage. ...
... Similarly, many voluntary associations that comprise political society in fact have to mirror the regulatory structures of NGOs within civil society, such as registration and the official organisational hierarchies to achieve a particular status. Rather, what may be taking place is the use of different types of political engagement rather than any real empirical difference between them (see individual chapters in Gudavarthy 2014). Furthermore, Chatterjee's lens of governmentalitythis is arguably less relevant in many of Africa's neglected slums devoid of the most basic of government programmesis criticised for lacking a transformative potential because of his focus on incremental micro-politics. ...
Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs of ending and in recent years are even accelerating amongst young men in informal settlements. Avenues for legal, institutional and civil society redress, nominally expanded in recent years, display an ongoing tendency towards disconnection from the grassroots. A case study from Mathare, Nairobi, seeks explanations for the lack of urgency in addressing EJE and also the limited effectiveness of responses to them that are rooted in the political economy of interests of civil society actors, which tends to perpetuate these ‘excluded spaces’ of the slum. The authors do so, however, by exploring one particular struggle to show how frustration with civil society is being used by social justice activists to articulate ideas of ‘everyday’ violence to mobilise for change that disrupts the apparent normalisation of EJE.
... Though Chatterjee's analogy of political society as opposed to civil society has been subject to severe criticism since its publication for his overgeneralization of political society at the rural hinterlands and confining civil society to the urban space, his characterization of political society comes closer to the reality of the case study. Critics have substantiated their arguments by referring to a consistent tradition of civil society as reflected in the burgeoning literature on civil society in India (Edwards, 2013;Gudavarthy, 2012). ...
Unlike the traditional top-down reactive way of handling the disaster, the community-based approach to disaster management calls for a holistic bottom-up approach reposing its faith in local communities who are usually caught hapless in the epicenter of disasters. Despite the proven efficacy of community engagement in disaster management, it has few takers in the policy circuit. This study uses a qualitative approach with content analysis techniques. The present paper with special reference to the community involvement in disaster management in Indonesia and India, concludes that community engagement in addition to institutional cooperation is equally important for the successful mitigation of disaster.
... Though Chatterjee's analogy of political society as opposed to civil society has been subject to severe criticism since its publication for his overgeneralization of political society at the rural hinterlands and confining civil society to the urban space, his characterization of political society comes closer to the reality of the case study. Critics have substantiated their arguments by referring to a consistent tradition of civil society as reflected in the burgeoning literature on civil society in India (Edwards, 2013;Gudavarthy, 2012). ...
Unlike the traditional top-down reactive way of handling the disaster, the community-based approach to disaster management calls for a holistic bottom-up approach reposing its faith in local communities who are usually caught hapless in the epicenter of disasters. Despite the proven efficacy of community engagement in disaster management, it has few takers in the policy circuit. This study uses a qualitative approach with content analysis techniques. The present paper with special reference to the community involvement in disaster management in Indonesia and India, concludes that community engagement in addition to institutional cooperation is equally important for the successful mitigation of disaster. Abstrak Berbeda dengan cara tradisional top-down reaktif dalam menangani bencana, pendekatan berbasis masyarakat untuk manajemen bencana menyerukan pendekatan bottom-up holistik yang menempatkan kepercayaannya pada komunitas lokal yang biasanya tidak beruntung di pusat bencana. Terlepas dari kemanjuran keterlibatan masyarakat yang terbukti dalam penanggulangan bencana, keterlibatan masyarakat dalam rangkaian kebijakan hanya sedikit yang terlibat. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan pendekatan dengan teknik analisis isi. Makalah ini dengan referensi khusus tentang keterlibatan masyarakat dalam penanggulangan bencana di Indonesia dan India, menyimpulkan bahwa keterlibatan masyarakat selain kerjasama kelembagaan sama pentingnya untuk keberhasilan mitigasi bencana. Kata kunci: masyarakat, pendekatan bottom-up, manajemen bencana.
... Yet, we need not grope in dark to investigate the conditions under which such public engagements may be developed. Many of us, including Gudavarthy, have sought to address this highly salient question of state-society engagement (Gudavarthy 2012). 6 Broad-based societal deliberations about the conduct of social, political, and economic affairs require that the state engages with not just well-organized interest groups, such as the various chambers of commerce that represent economic elites, but also myriad other social movements and civic initiatives that should have an equal say in the polity. ...
For the social scientists and the well-read Kairos readers, the text
demonstrates both the limitations and the potential of conjoining political theory
analyses with a political ethnography approach. Traditionally, political theory
has been a normative field, that is, a field that asks questions of ethics and
morality that are beyond the realm of simplistic empirical observations. However, the
fusion of political theory and observation-based ethnography requires multilayered
and slow-form analyses that do not lend very easily to the format of
writing that Gudavarthy has experimented with. The writing is expansive in its
coverage of a long list of questions that do not always come together in a coherent
analysis. One gets a sense that these limitations have to do with the text’s origin
in various newspaper columns that were written originally without a plan to pull
them together into a book.The task of conjoining insights from political theory with an ethnographic and sociologically oriented political analysis is worth pursuing with some
doggedness. This would best be approached in a careful and deliberative manner
without succumbing to straw man binaries that are the staple of newspaper
columns.
... 11. For a concise overview of some of the critique of Chatterjee's highly influential argument, see Gudavarthy (2012). 12. ...
This article examines the controversy over land transfers for two proposed but now deadlocked industrial projects in India. Both projects – one in Andhra Pradesh, the other in West Bengal – were initially presented as key to the future development of each state and given strong backing by their respective state governments. They also appeared well financed by technically competent, Indian private sector companies, indicating that swift implementation should have been expected. However, once strong opposition emerged from the potential displacees, supported by both political and civil society, both projects failed to come to fruition. Restitution of the land already acquired for these hibernating projects remains to be carried out however – the land at present lies vacant and is used neither for industrialization, nor for any other productive purpose. We characterize this stalemated form of development as ‘development deadlock’ that in effect benefits nobody. Key to explaining this outcome is, we argue, the significant uncertainty and complexity that arises when many different groups, respectively, promote and oppose a project within a fractured politico-administrative and legal system marred by considerable ambiguity. The present deadlock is seen as a combination of neglect and nurture by the actors involved in land struggles.
... See Nilsen (2012) for an extended discussion. In formulating this argument, I also seek to contribute to the emergence of a new direction in the study of subaltern politics in India (for examples of such work, see, inter alia,Madhok 2013, Subramanian 2009, Sharma 2009, Chandra 2013, Nielsen 2010and Agarwala 2013. 3 SeeChatterjee (2004) for the original formulation of the civil society/political society distinction andGudavarthy (2012) for a comprehensive selection of commentaries on Chatterjee's proposition. See alsoWhitehead (2015) for a substantial criticism of Chatterjee's distinction between political and civil society. ...
Focusing on recent debates over the ways in which subaltern groups engage with the state in India, the article proposes that it is imperative to historicise our conceptions of subaltern politics in India. More specifically, the argument is made that it is imperative to recognise that subaltern appropriations of the institutions and discourses of the state have a longer historical lineage than what is often proposed in critical work on popular resistance in rural India. The article presents a detailed analysis of Adivasi rebellions in colonial western India and argues that these took the form of a contentious negotiation of the incorporation of tribal communities into an emergent “colonial state space.” The conclusion presents a sketch of a Gramscian approach to the study of how subaltern politics proceeds in and through determinate state-society relations.
... It is possible to read the campaign against the CZM Notification within the context of the multiple uprisings that beset neo-liberalising India, from the fights against displacement by SEZs in Singur and Nandigram, to those against displacement by mining in Odisha and Chattisgarh, to the massive ongoing resistance to the nuclear power plant in Koodankulam, Tamil Nadu. As such, it would contribute to the debates over what the occasional victories in such battles, as well as wider legislative gains such as the Forest Rights Act, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or the Right to Information Act, tell us about the state, civil society, the exigencies of electoral politics, and the particular class/caste/regional coalitions of Indian democracy (see for instance, Chatterjee 2008; Baviskar and Sundar 2008;Gudavarthy 2012). But the CZM campaign further belongs to a specific subset of such issues, along with others like biotechnology and nuclear energy, which are not only against displacement, appropriation or harm by a particular project, but also about broader policy and the knowledges that constitute it. ...
Recent struggles over coastal zone policy in India make it a fertile site within which to map the actors, institutions, and knowledges involved in contemporary ecological governance. In 2007, the government drafted a coastal zone policy that marked a shift from the previous regulation approach based on hard boundaries and prohibitions, to a management framework using Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) studies and new scientific technologies to draw up flexible localised plans. The new policy suffered a reversal, however, when a concerted civil society campaign of opposition forced its withdrawal and a return to the earlier regulatory approach, albeit with numerous modifications. This paper argues that the power of the campaign was not just political, but also informational. It traces the multiple and intersecting trajectories through which knowledges are developed, transmitted, and employed. In particular, what emerges is the role of an important 'straddling' or 'interface' layer of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and technical 'experts,' and the role of new information technologies and technologies of governance in enabling a cross-cutting circulation of knowledges. Interests, actors, and knowledges/technologies do not always map neatly on to each other, challenging binaries such as 'traditional' and 'modern,' or 'local' and 'global,' and rendering unpredictable the outcome of contestations over policy and governance.
... Ao invés disso, ela parece focar exclusivamente nas transações negociadas -entre agências governamentais e grupos populacionais específicos -sobre a distribuição dos benefícios governamentais. Ela implica lutas pela sobrevivência que são limitadas e impedem o surgimento de estratégias de longo prazo ou perspectivas de transformação radical (Gudavarthy, 2012). ...
O artigo consiste em uma análise da experiência da democracia indiana, que remonta às tentativas de torná-la mais democrática. Para tal empenho, divide a questão em três níveis temáticos: a luta armada (a presença da guerrilha maoista na Índia Central), a primazia da esfera cívica sobre a política e a dominância da esfera política sobre a legal. Todos se mostrarão incapazes de radicalizar a democracia indiana. A principal questão sublinhada no artigo repousa no fato de que as três tentativas acabam por propor, de modos distintos, a negação da política e, no limite, da própria democracia, duramente conquistada na Índia em sua revolução da independência de 1947. Ao mesmo tempo, chama a atenção para dois aspectos fundamentais. De um lado, possui bases reais a generalizada descrença dos cidadãos na capacidade do Estado de equacionar e encaminhar soluções sobre os graves problemas econômicos, políticos, sociais, éticos, que afetam a maioria da população da Índia. De outro, somente a retomada da política democrática restauraria os elos perdidos da revolução nacional.
Civil society is a concept central to most, particularly Euro‐American, understandings of politics. Broadly conceived as the area of political activity that takes place outside the state, civil society has often been seen as a space of liberal political freedom or, from a more radical perspective, as a space of bourgeois hegemonic control. Since the collapse of state socialism, “civil society” has become a key term for political and development geographers seeking to understand how processes like economic and cultural globalization have shifted political activity into “new,” transnational forms. These debates did not do away with radical theorists' concerns that the potential of civil society as a domain for transformative political change has been overblown. Current debates concern the utility of “civil society” as a concept that adequately expresses the diversity of political forms occurring today. In particular, the concept of political society has been posited as a subaltern zone of difference to an elite civil society. An engagement with civil society then remains a key part of a framework for understanding the relations between politics and society.
Partha Chatterjee's distinction between civil society and 'political society' in post-colonial countries has provoked much debate and discussion. This has remained controversial in the current literature on post-colonialism in respect of democracy, development and politics. In this article I contest his distinction by pointing out, first that his conception of civil society is limited and abstract (and universalist) that leaves out the vast rural life in India. Second, I question the conceptual and empirical validity of his concept of political society, and argue that his original concept of political society was an urban space of illegality and criminality, but his subsequent shift to cover rural India does not explain how original conception works out in rural India. The empirical evidence available suggests that his so-called political society in rural India is actually part of civil society such as rural clubs, NGOs and other associations that operates in the interface of state, politics and society. In conclusion I seek to restore the political society as the space of the nation-state based on, following Locke, the right to life, liberty and property; trust (contract), definite and codified laws, impartial judiciary, separation of powers, limited government by popular consent and the people's right to revolt.
Partha Chatterjee’s work on postcolonial politics articulates the limits of participation and governance in contexts of stark inequality. Chatterjee’s argument can be stretched within the South African context of protest and political contestation as it demonstrates that civil and political societies are fluid, political categories. From student to shack dweller movements, political society in South Africa disrupts top-down, dichotomous notions of ‘administration’ or ‘governance’. I outline that the interactions between Chatterjee’s political and civil society overlap with one another, but importantly, that this overlap determines the broader, shifting continuum of popular sovereignty that these two fields act within. Ordinary ‘populations’ of political society are able to infiltrate the ‘sanitized walls’ of civil society, contexts in which ‘political society’ sometimes draws on the language of rights and institutions such as the courts as well as practices of mobilization and disruption. South African mobilization illustrates the usefulness of engaging with the inequalities of governance via categories of civil and political society, but also shows that these are complicated and contested fields within the country’s political and democratic framework. We cannot understand the notions of either political or civil society without contextualizing these processes within a framework that allows for the shifting continuum, and acknowledgement of the possibility of the existence of popular sovereignty. It is this broader, structural categorization, within which the forces of political and civil society fluidly interact that we need to conceptualize popular sovereignty in Chatterjee’s description of ‘most of the world.’
How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering ‘refusal’, which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of ‘resistance’. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with reference to fieldwork with Burmese grassroots activists and Rohingya civil society actors, the article delineates resistance and refusal as divergent but intertwined tools for engaging different aspects of any given apparatus of power. Where resistance describes opposition to direct domination (sovereign modes of power, following Foucault’s schema), refusal describes the disavowals, rejections and manoeuvrings with and away from diffuse and mediated forms of power (governmentality). To the extent that contemporary apparatuses of power typically constitute a hybrid assemblage of sovereign and governmental forces, subjects of population groups draw upon both resistance and refusal tactics in their navigations of these apparatuses, navigations that refigure the collective resisting/refusing subject. Resistance and refusal hence operate in a quasi-dialectical relation, meaning that through a play of recursivity between apparent converse strategies (direct confrontation versus evasion) groups come to fortify stronger positions from which they can persist. Resistance and refusal not only constitute the conditions of each other’s possibility, sharpening the particular interventions that each makes, but demonstrate the necessity of a politics of manoeuvre in which subjects—as individuals and part of collective groups—oscillate between direct confrontation and governmental navigation.
This article applies Partha Chatterjee's concept of political society to the case of postwar urban Angola in order to draw attention to the everyday ways in which popular politics are practiced in Africa beyond episodic moments of popular revolt. It looks at the case of the Zango social-housing project, which was created to resettle evicted shack dwellers in Luanda. While in the initial stages of the project responses to resettlement were marked by bouts of protest and resistance against the state, over time these shifted to the emergence and formulation of informal strategies, arrangements, and understandings to claim, gain, and explain access to housing in the project, often in collaboration with state officials. Although the application of Chatterjee's work to Angola opens up useful avenues for comparative analysis, it also shows the particularities of the workings of popular politics under conditions of nondemocratic rule. It is by studying the daily workings of popular politics in relation to the actual and fragmented workings of the state that insight can be gained into the variegated nature of political practice and agency across the global south.
The chapter conducts an analysis of the politics of human rights through Brazil’s re-democratization under the spiral model of human rights change theory (Risse, Ropp, & Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, Cambridge University Press, 1999; The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance, Cambridge University Press, 2013), in order to describe the context in which the public policy for the protection of human rights defenders started being implemented in 2004. This approach helped unveil persistent structural problems preventing the strengthening of democracy, the fulfillment of human rights, and the accomplishment of social justice, all of which is characterized by social authoritarianism (Dagnino, An Alternative World Order and the Meaning of Democracy. In J. Brecher, J. B. Childs, & J. Cutler (Eds.), Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order. New York, NY: South End Press, 1993; Os Movimentos Sociais e a Emergência de uma Nova Noção de Cidadania. In E. Dagnino (Ed.), Anos 90: Política e Sociadade no Brasil. São Paulo, SP: Editora Brasiliense, 1994; Culture, Citizenship, and Democracy: Changing Discourses and Practices of the Latin American Left. In S. E. Alvarez, E. Dagnino, & A. Escobar (Eds.), Culture of Politics, Politics of Culture: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements. London: Westview Press, 1998; JILAS—Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 7, 75–104, 2001; “We All Have Rights But …”: Contesting Conceptions of Citizenship in Brazil. In N. Kabeer (Ed.), Inclusive Citizenship. Meaning and Expressions of Citizenship. Chicago, IL: Zed Books, 2005; Fordham Law Review, 75, 2469–2482, 2007a; Development in Practice, 17, 549–556, 2007b; Civic Driven Changes and Political Projects. In A. Fowler & K. Bierkhart (Eds.), Civic Driven Change. Citizen’s Imagination in Action. Institute of Social Studies: The Hague, 2008a; Cultural Processes Newsletter of the Research Network Sociology of Culture, European Sociological Association, 1, 18–23, 2008b). It also helps explain why human rights defenders play a significant role in bringing about political, social, economic and cultural changes. Finally, the chapter conducts a discussion concerning some of the problems that inhibit the advancement of human rights, and develops the argument that Brazil needs to reach full compliance with international human rights law in order to tackle those problems.
The large-scale transfer of land from rural communities to private corporations has become a defining feature of India’s development trajectory. These land transfers have given rise to a multitude of new “land wars” as dispossessed groups have struggled to retain their land. Yet while much has been written about the political economy of development that underpins this new form of dispossession, the ways in which those threatened with dispossession have sought to mobilize have to a lesser extent been subject to close ethnographic scrutiny. This article argues that an “everyday politics” perspective can enhance our understanding of India’s new land wars, using a case from Singur as the starting point. The agenda is twofold. I show how everyday life domains and sociopolitical relations pertaining to caste, class, gender, and party political loyalty were crucial to the making of the Singur movement and its politics. Second, by analyzing the movement in processual terms, I show how struggles over land can be home to a multitude of political meanings and aspirations as participants seek to use new political forums to resculpt everyday sociopolitical relations.
This article critically analyses Partha Chatterjee’s recent concepts of civil society and political society, showing that their binary character is derived from a culturalist conflation of capitalism with modernity. In turn, modernity becomes equated with a naturalised liberal democratic state, precluding any appreciation of how resistance can and does shape the character of the state. Second, it compares Chatterjee’s categories of civil and political society to those of Gramsci, arguing that a return to classical Gramscian categories, along with an appreciation of the impact of colonialism on state forms, can provide studies of resistance with a richer and more elegant understanding of social change from below in contemporary India.
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