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Transcript of Chapter 2 - Swagato Sarkar in Ajay Gudavarthy
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition fi rst published in UK and USA 2012
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
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© 2012 Ajay Gudavarthy editorial matter and selection;
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The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Re-framing democracy and agency in India : interrogating political society / edited by
Ajay Gudavarthy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-85728-350-4 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Democracy–India. 2. Political participation–India.
3. Civil society–India. 4. Postcolonialism–India. I. Gudavarthy, Ajay.
JQ281.R43 2012
320.954–dc23
2012000946
ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 350 4 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 0 85728 350 2 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an eBook.
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
List of Tables xi
Chapter 1 Introduction: Why Interrogate Political Society? 1
Ajay Gudavarthy
Part I: Political Society and Protest Politics
Chapter 2 Political Society in a Capitalist World 31
Swagato Sarkar
Chapter 3 Antinomies of Political Society – Implications
of Uncivil Development 49
Ajay Gudavarthy and G. Vijay
Chapter 4 Civil Society and the Urban Poor 73
Supriya RoyChowdhury
Chapter 5 Contentious Politics and Civil Society in Varanasi 93
Jolie M. F. Wood
Chapter 6 The Politics of a Political Society 125
Ranabir Samaddar
Part II: Political Society, Middlemen and Mobility
Chapter 7 The Pyraveekar: The ‘Fixer’ in Rural India 155
G. Ram Reddy and G. Haragopal
Chapter 8 Politics of Middlemen and Political Society 171
Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava
and René Véron
Chapter 9 Widows’ Organizations in Kerala State, India: Seeking
Citizenship amidst the Decline of Political Society 201
J. Devika and A. K. Rajasree
viii RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
Part III: Civil Society and/or Political Society
Chapter 10 Clubbing Together: Village Clubs, Local NGOs
and the Mediations of Political Society 235
Tom Harrison
Chapter 11 Civic Anxieties and Dalit Democratic Culture:
Balmikis in Delhi 253
Omar Kutty
Chapter 12 The Habits of the Political Heart: Recovering Politics
from Governmentality 269
Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar
Chapter 13 Civil Society in the East and Some Dark Thoughts
about the Prospects of Political Society 289
Sanjeeb Mukherjee
Part IV: Rejoinder
Chapter 14 The Debate over Political Society 305
Partha Chatterjee
List of Contributors 323
Chapter 2
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD1
Swagato Sarkar
Partha Chatterjee is one of the very few scholars in India who have
systematically tried to theorize the specifi city of Indian democratic politics.
His conceptualization of political society can be seen as an approach to
explicate the latter’s logics. This conceptualization has been modifi ed and
refi ned over the years by mediating on the concrete historical experience of
a post-colonial country and through a critical engagement with the received
Western normative political theory. In this paper, I will fi rst provide a sketch
of Chatterjee’s criticism of the concept of civil society, and then present a
critical review of his concept of political society. I will focus on the three
tension-ridden components of his project, viz. the defence of a communal
way of life, mapping the differentiated political space, and a suspicion towards
constitutionalism. I will argue, against Chatterjee, that the concept of political
society does not denote a positive political development, that is, it does not
present a possibility for ‘substantially redefi ning property and law’ in favour
of subaltern people/classes or the ‘actual expansion of the freedoms of the
people’; rather, it should be used to provide a critical insight into Indian
politics, particularly in relation to the process of capitalist expansion and
differentiation.
Chatterjee’s Critique of Civil Society
It is well known that the discussion on political society is embedded in the
debate on civil society and the critique of the conceptual infrastructure
of Western normative theory. In this debate, normatively, civil society has
1 This paper is a modified and expanded form of a paper published in 2008 (Sarkar
2008).
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
32 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
been identifi ed as a domain for the expansion and realization of rights
and freedom (Cohen and Arato 1992), and instrumentally, it is seen as
a domain wherein the distribution, exercise and control of power are
(democratically) contested (Nonan-Ferrell 2004). With these two domains
taken together, civil society is an integral part of democracy and a
placeholder of institutions.
I will argue that Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Western normative theory
and civil society is primarily a critique of the subject (that is, citizen) that this
theory supposes. His critique draws attention to the interpellative structure
and the criteria of membership of the institutions proposed/assumed by this
theory, namely, the erasure of difference in favour of formal equality and
freedom (Chatterjee 2004). The effect of this formal interpellation is that the
state in its conduct can recognize or favour citizens only as unencumbered
individuals, severed of any primordial ties – a product of Western humanism
and secularism. Since the primordial identities of the citizens are not invoked
or referred to, they are rendered homogeneous before the state, namely, as
a nation. It is the will of the citizens, expressed as their generalized political
aspiration and popular sovereignty, which gives legitimacy to the state and
forms the basis of democracy.
Here, Chatterjee posits the concrete post-colonial context against the
normative concept of civil society, and argues that only a handful of the ‘elites’
in post-colonial countries can meet such a criterion of citizenship. These
elites are a product of modernity that has been inherited from colonialism,
and can meet the demand of being unencumbered either because they are
cultured/socialized into such a being, or can simply afford to ignore/avoid
their primordial identities. Hence, the scope of the concept of civil society is
restrictive. This (normative) theoretical position is also problematic because
the concept of ‘community’, which provides meaning to most of the people in
these countries, is suppressed and relegated to the pre-modern historical time
(Chatterjee 1993, 1998, 2004). Therefore, civil society is a limited normative
concept and an undifferentiated space.
Put differently, Western normative theory fi nds only a section of the
post-colonial society as the true bearer of modernity. One can note that,
by foregrounding communal being (and identity), Chatterjee differentiates
‘community’ from civil society in an ontological way, that is, a way of life
based on a shared kinship (see below), rather than a contractual (and formal)
associational life in civil society. He proposes to split the political space, and
to conceptualize a domain, separate and distinct from civil society, that is,
political society.
Thus, the following three issues are at stake here: (i) the difference in
ontology (/particular ways of life), (ii) the differentiation of political space, and
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 33
(iii) the signifi cance of formal and normative concepts vis-à-vis the empirical
context. Chatterjee tries to engage with these three issues to provide a theory
of political society which will demonstrate the democratic urge and the
expansion of freedom of the members of political society (that is, subalterns)
in India and other post-colonial countries. In other words, he attempts to
develop a normative theory of (populist) democracy based on the experience of post-
colonial countries like India.
Chatterjee on Political Society
Chatterjee’s advocacy for the identifi cation of a different political space beyond
civil society rests on three moves. First, he focuses attention on the sphere
of governmental interventions where, he claims, a different kind of political
engagement between the legal–bureaucratic apparatus and the people who
are excluded from civil society can be witnessed.
The post-colonial Indian state inherited the legal-bureaucratic apparatus,
which is able ‘to reach as the target of many of its activities virtually all of
the population that inhabits its territory, [whereas] the domain of civil social
institutions…is still restricted to a fairly small section of “citizens”’ (Chatterjee
2001, 172). According to Chatterjee, this is a new paradigm, and there is a clear
shift from the abstract theoretical domain of citizenship to the actual domain
of (public) policy. Following Foucault, he claims that the domain of policy is
predicated upon a conception of the society as one constituted by population,
not citizens or ‘elementary units of homogenous families’ (Chatterjee 1998,
279; 2001, 173). ‘The regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of
citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for the well-
being of the population’ (Chatterjee 1998, 279). Thus, Chatterjee’s fi rst move
shifts the focus of political theory from the normative category of ‘citizen’ to
the descriptive and empirical category of ‘population’.
The concept of population is predicated upon an enumerable, descriptive,
and empirical ‘mass’ of people, and does not rely on a normative theory
or abstraction. The population is ‘assumed to contain, large elements of
‘naturalness’ and ‘primordiality’; the internal principles of the constitution
of particular population groups is not expected to be rationally explicable
since they are not the products of rational contractual association, but are,
as it were, pre-rational’ (Chatterjee 2001, 173 and passim). The concept
of population offers the governmental functions and apparatus an access to
‘a set of rationally manipulable instruments for reaching [a] large section of
the inhabitants of a country as the targets of “policy”.’
Chatterjee makes the second move by arguing that such interventions in
the society-as-population, if we may call it, and the interaction between these
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
34 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
governmental apparatus and the population groups inaugurate a new site for
strategic manoeuvring, resistance and appropriation. Chatterjee calls this site
political society. The strategic manoeuvre and mobilization that take place in
this domain neither always conform, nor are consistent with, the principles
of association in civil society – they often result in the transgression of law.
Yet, Chatterjee identifi es an ‘urge for democracy’ in this mobilization in
political society, as it channels the demands on the developmental state – the state
that looks after its people and provides benefi ts. Therefore, the subject at this
stage of his argument is a ‘subject of development’.
The third move is made by translating the ‘subject of development’ into
a ‘political subject’, by assigning an identity to it and fi nding a normative
ground for it. Chatterjee is interested in exploring how people use the space
opened by the intervention of governmental functions. As we have seen,
such interventions perceive the society as population and then categorize the
latter into empirical groups that become the ‘target’ for policies. However,
such categorization also infuses a new identity into the group, and many a
time, the constituents of the group emerge as distinct political entities. These
new groups have a territorial boundary, ‘clearly defi ned in time and space’
(Chatterjee 2004, 58 and passim). Consistent with his critique of civil society
and the foregrounding of community, Chatterjee tries to demonstrate how
these groups become a ‘community’ – and thus a collective, and also fi nds
a normative ground for the latter’s demands. According to him, since
the livelihood and existence of many of the members of such groups are
predicated upon a (collective) violation of (property) laws, they appear as
‘illegal entities’ before the state. They are not recognized as proper civic bodies,
pursuing legitimate objectives. Thus, to be recognized by the governmental
functions, they must ‘fi nd ways of investing their collective identity with a
moral content’ (ibid., 57 and passim) and thereby ‘give to the empirical form of a
population group the moral attributes of a community’ (emphasis in original). Yet this
community is about ‘the shared interests of the members of association...
they describe the community in…terms of a shared kinship… the most
common metaphor…is that of a family’.
Chatterjee never spells out what he means by the ‘moral content’ of an
identity, but it seems that these new groups appropriate the proposition of the
‘government’s obligation to look after the poor and underprivileged population
groups’ (Chatterjee 2004, 60). The objective of their mobilization is to ‘secure
the benefi ts of governmental programs’ (Chatterjee 2004, 66), which they
claim as ‘a matter of rights and use their association as the principal collective
instrument to pursue that claim’ (ibid., 59). This, according to Chatterjee, is a
clear break with the erstwhile patron–client exchanges, and an indication of
their political assertion.
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 35
Chatterjee explains that the mobilization which takes place on the terrain
of political society is ‘necessarily temporary and contextual’, and ‘depends
entirely on the ability of particular population groups to mobilize support to
infl uence the implementation of government policy in their favour’ (Chatterjee
2004, 60, emphasis added; note – implementation, not policy formulation, as he
has already mentioned, ‘The regime secures legitimacy not by the participation
of citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for the well-
being of the population’ [Chatterjee 1998, 279]). Such strategic politics must
operate within the constellation of the (mainstream) political formations (that
is, parties, but also non-governmental organizations?). The success of such
strategic manoeuvring depends on ‘applying the right pressure at the right
places in the governmental machinery’ (Chatterjee 2004, 66). However, they
do not always have access to such ‘right places’, and therefore, ‘to produce a
viable and persuasive politics of the governed, there has to be considerable act
of mediation’ (ibid., 64). Hence, there is a real need for fi nding trustworthy
mediators who can represent them.
It is through such political engagements that people are ‘substantial[ly]
redefi n[ing] property and law within the actually existing modern state’
(Chatterjee 2004, 75) and ‘are devising new ways in which they can choose how
they should be governed... people are learning, and forcing their governors
to learn, how they would prefer to be governed…[which itself is a] good
justifi cation for democracy’ (ibid., 77–78).
A Critical Appraisal of Political Society
As mentioned earlier, Chatterjee’s critique of civil society is predicated
on the critique of the subject that Western normative theory supposes.
Furthermore, his conceptualization of political society is predicated on the
difference in the modes of ‘transacting business with the constitutional state’
(Chatterjee 1998, 282). Thus, it is the modality of realization of rights that
separates political society from civil society. The difference in ontology which
Chatterjee introduced at the beginning of his critique of civil society – by
foregrounding the lived experience of a ‘communal’ being, as opposed to the
associational life of the unencumbered modern individuals in civil society –
is replaced with a critical appraisal of the procedural dimension of Indian
democracy (involved in ‘transacting business’, as quoted above). Even though
‘community’ is invoked in the discursive construction of the political subject,
the successful manoeuvring (including para-legal negotiations and transgression
and suspension of law) in political society is not dependent on that invocation;
rather it is dependent on the ‘majoritarian bias’, as we shall later see. In sum,
the communal–associational difference becomes untenable or insignifi cant
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
36 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
as Chatterjee carries forward his argument. While trying to explore the
ontology of this later position, we do not fi nd any elaboration of the concept
of the social. Rather, Chatterjee reads social relationships and practices ‘in
relation to the legal-political forms of the modern state’ (Chatterjee 2004, 74).
He engages neither with the immanent antagonisms in the social, nor with the
quasi-transcendental conditions of the possibility and impossibility of political
actions/interventions. To modify my last observation, I can say that, at the
ontological level, Chatterjee posits the difference between political society and
civil society in terms of the difference in the legal status of the entities that
the state encounters, and the contestation and negotiations which take place
over law, rules and norms become the focus of his analysis. It is, therefore, no
surprise to see that the procedural dimension unfolds in terms of judging the
legal status of the means of the chosen economic activity by, and amenities
for physical living of, the members of political society. Political action is seen
in terms of establishing the legal, or transgressing the illegal, status within
the black letter (property) law (which becomes a referent point). Political space,
then, is strictly the space of interaction between the state and the ‘population’.
Obviously, Chatterjee sees this in a positive light.
Chatterjee argues that as the new political entities wrangle over property
and benefi ts, they also strike at the foundation of property relations. Property,
Chatterjee reminds us, is ‘the conceptual name of regulations by law of
relations between individuals in civil society’ (Chatterjee 2004, 74 and passim).
But as these ‘social relations’ are yet to be ‘mo[u]lded into proper forms of
civil society, the state must maintain a fi ction that in the constitution of its
sovereignty, all citizens belong to civil society and are, by virtue of that legally
constructed fact, equal subjects of the law’. This ‘fi ctional’ element must be
addressed in the actual administrative processes.
The post-colonial (Indian) state not only fi nds a different legal entity/subject,
but also negotiates with it, instead of liquidating or banishing it. According
to Chatterjee, this negotiation does not take place because of the state’s
benevolence; rather these subjects force the state to do so. Therefore, a positive
appraisal of political society is pivoted on demonstrating the agency of the people
in forcing the state to recognize them. The normative dimension of political
society becomes visible in terms of delineating alternative (even if contingent)
criteria for the recognition by the state. The governmental functions and non-
governmental agencies are forced to recognize the ‘demands’ of the members of
political society in a different way. Since, these agencies do not recognize these
members or groups as part of civil society, so they cannot negotiate with them
according to the formal and strict procedures and law of the land, i.e. the so-called
autonomy of the state is not obtained here. Hence, there is a proliferation of
layered mediations and para-legal arrangements to resolve various contentious
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 37
issues, and to meet the demands of these groups. The governmental bodies and
political representatives deliberate and negotiate to identify the valid claims
(Chatterjee 2004, 69). However, such negotiations must be hidden and not
formally recorded, as ‘it is entirely possible that the negotiations on the ground
did not respect the principles of bureaucratic rationality or even the provisions
of law’ (ibid., 73). Chatterjee appreciates this ‘para-legal arrangement’ and the
actions in political society as an act of ‘actual expansion of the freedoms of the
people’ (ibid., 66 and passim). Chatterjee argues that certain groups participate
in political process by manoeuvring in political society, which is otherwise not
possible within the liberal space of the associations of civil society.2 He claims
that the transactions in political society open up the possibility to ‘effectively
work against the [existing] distribution of power in society as a whole’ (emphasis
in original). This possibility, according to him, is realized through the distribution
of property rights. He briefl y refers to Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which
‘embod[ies] a set of substantive freedoms rather than utilities or income or
primary goods’ (ibid., 68) to support his claim.
However, there is a limit to this ‘agency argument’, which also indicates
the limit of political society. First, there is a problem of scale. In view of the
fact that (successful) negotiations and the modalities of realization of rights
in political society are contingent and specifi c to a locale – the terminal stage
of application of power – the methodology (mostly ethnographic case studies)
can enlighten us about micro- and capillary politics, but not about the macro
processes. It will be diffi cult to induce a general condition of freedom from
such micro-political events even though it affi rms the liberal political theory
which posits an agent (here, the ‘governeds’) who experiences freedom, in both
the negative and positive ways, but it does not problematize the actual scale or
type of the structural conditions. However, since Chatterjee chooses to focus
on property relationships and welfare benefi ts, the structural conditions which
make capitalist expansion possible and to what extent the members of political
society can negotiate within capitalism and expand their freedom are at stake
here. Second, Chatterjee observes that the leverage in political society is linked
with the ‘inherent majoritarian bias of electoral democracy’ (Chatterjee
2008b, 90 and passim). Because of this bias, certain sections of the population
are excluded from political society, producing newly marginalized groups,
comprising of low-caste and adivasi people. ‘Political society and electoral
democracy have not given these groups the means to make effective claims on
2 This participation-through-manoeuvring is not based on a communal way of life, that
is, it is not a question of the communal way of life helping in the formation of a group,
analogous to the concept of class-in-itself. Successful manoeuvring depends on access
to mediators, as we will see below.
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
38 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
governmentality. In this sense, these marginalized groups represent an outside
beyond the boundaries of political society.’3 This third space (after civil and
political societies) is a new category in Chatterjee’s writing, which John and
Deshpande (2008, 85) call the ‘liminal zone’. Two points need to be noted
here: fi rst, the project (of political geography) to delineate and exhaustively
map the differentiated political space is under threat as we continuously need
to conceive new categories to capture this spatial differentiation exhaustively –
there is always a space which remains outside (here, ‘liminal zone’). Second,
the possibility of negotiation and transgression of law with impunity is
perhaps linked to this ‘majoritarian bias’ and the related capacity to form a
nexus between the elite and subaltern. As I mentioned earlier, the successful
manoeuvring in political society is not dependent on the communal way of
life; if it were so, then the stronger communal life of adivasi people would
have secured them a place in political society. Therefore, we need to question
Chatterjee’s ‘communitarian’ and post-modernist (/post-Marxist?) suspicion
towards law and constitutionalism, and argue that law, rules and norms can be
both emancipatory, on one hand, and repressive and disciplinary, on the other.
In other words, the transgression of law and contingent para-legal negotiations
cannot solely secure the emancipatory possibility (that is, the actual expansion
of freedom) for the members of political society, as Chatterjee argues. In the
next section, I will elaborate and dwell upon these critical issues.
Political Society as a Critique
Here, it is pertinent to ask why Chatterjee theorizes political society in
a statist/state-centric and legalistic way. It might be helpful to refer to the
original concept of governmentality to understand that impulse. While
developing the concept of political society, particularly in terms of ‘the politics
of the governed’, Chatterjee selectively draws from the Foucauldian concept
of governmentality. Governmentality, as we know, denotes the generalized
governmental rationality, beyond that of the state. Methodologically, it studies
the strategic fi eld of application of power, whose problematic is: ‘[H]ow
best to govern[?]’ (O’Malley et al. 1997, 502). Governmentality is about
the organization of resources and institutions, and establishment of norms
and practices, among other things, and about justifying this constellation.
Thereby, as we know, power assumes a productive dimension, rather than a
3 Samir Kumar Das argues that there are sections of the population that escape the
calculative logic of enumeration and thereby they become the ‘ungoverneds’. But it is
not clear why this should be the case, that is, the kind of logical inconsistency or limit
of governmentality involved here is not readily understood.
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 39
negative and repressive one. Thomas Lemke argues that the salient feature of
Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality is that it ‘links technologies
of the self with technologies of domination, the constitution of the subject to
the formation of the state; and fi nally, it helps to differentiate between power
and domination’ (Lemke 2002, 51).
Government refers to more or less systematized, regulated and refl ected
modes of power (a ‘technology’) that go beyond the spontaneous
exercise of power over others, following a specifi c form of reasoning (a
‘rationality’) which defi nes the telos of action or the adequate means to
achieve it. (Lemke 2002, 53)
And thereby, ‘structuring and shaping the fi eld of possible action of subjects’
(ibid., 52).
In Chatterjee’s conceptualization of political society and the case studies
that he engages with, we never see the interlinkage between the ‘technologies
of the self ’ and ‘technologies of domination’. As mentioned earlier, what
comes out is the politicization of the process of surveying and categorization
(which are not exactly the ‘technologies of domination’) of the population,
that is, people use the very categories that are generated or used in surveys and
censuses (which again are not exactly the ‘technologies of the self ’), to stake
claims on the state. Read in this way, Chatterjee’s notion of the ‘governed’
as a subject of political society is nominal, and the process of ‘subjection to
power’ in the domain of governmental/public policy – which is the premise
of Chatterjee’s argument – does not end up producing/constructing any
subjectivity as such. And this happens, because governmentality is played out
in India exclusively within the body politic of the state, not beyond the latter.4
My statement might seem to be contradictory to Chatterjee’s (2008b, 93) later
claim that ‘governmental power...is no longer restricted to the branches of
the state…but extends to a host of non-state and even non-governmental
agencies’. Chatterjee does not defi ne ‘governmental power’ explicitly; however,
it is evident that he sees ‘governmental power’ to be beyond the state from the
standpoint of the institutional space of application of power, but not from the
problematic of ‘subject’, ‘subjectivity’5 and rationality.
In Chatterjee’s writings, ‘governmentality’ is just an alternative way of
understanding the interaction of the Indian state with the population, and
4 One can observe the nascent attempts at expanding governmentality beyond the state
in projects like the Unique Identity (UID) project or Aadhaar.
5 This problematic is central in Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality. Refer to
‘Two Lectures’ by Foucault (1980), particularly pages 97–8.
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
40 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
does not refer to the generalized ‘governmental rationality’ – perhaps, that
itself points to the post-colonial predicament. A lack of mediation on this
predicament makes political society a theory of politics6 – describing the
modes of transaction between the state and the ‘governeds’. A description
of the social conditions in which the ‘governeds’ fi nd themselves does not
elucidate or clarify the ontology of the social, from which the specifi city of
the post-colonial condition (and the predicament therein) – a sketch of which
is attempted below – can be explained or elaborated.7 Without such a critical
engagement, Chatterjee remains within the liberal strand of political theory,
wherein the expansion of the liberal institutional order is presented as an
unlimited, albeit a hindered or interrupted, process. Since Chatterjee does
not read the practices of governmentality as political logics, governmentality
almost becomes a shorthand for such a liberal political order, already in a
position to accommodate and subsume various negativities, particularly in
the context of capitalist expansion, which is an evolutionist view of political
order. Chatterjee does not deconstruct the metaphysics (of presence) of such
political practices, which could point to the impossibility of constituting an
order and thereby also demonstrate (again) the limit of naming a political space
as civil or political society.
If the theory of political society has to be statist, then it might be more
helpful to conduct a thorough investigation of the ways in which the post-
colonial state ‘transacts business with the population’ and the consequences
of that on the established laws, rules and norms from various perspectives/
standpoints. What emerges from Chatterjee’s description in various cases (and
many scholars would also attest to the factual basis of those) is that the post-
colonial state is contradictory and indecisive in its conduct:8 on the one hand, it
is marked by hesitancy and weakness in obtaining compliance with the existing
codifi ed norms and in enforcing certain legal and executive orders, while on
6 I borrow the term ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ from Chantal Mouffe, where ‘the political’
refers to ‘the dimension of antagonism which [is] constitutive of human societies’,
and ‘politics’ refers to ‘the set of practices and institutions through which an order is
created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the
political’ (Mouffe 2005, 9).
7 Also, without such a consideration, the emergence of political subjects cannot be
understood. The Foucauldian understanding of subject formation through subjection
to power has been thoroughly criticized by Jacques Derrida. Refer to Derrida (1972,
1973) and Ernesto Laclau (1990).
8 Say the hesitancy of the erstwhile Left Front Government of West Bengal in the case of
the rotting corpse of Balak Brahmachari of the Santan Dal (a religious sect) (Chatterjee
2004, 41–51), and the same government’s use of police force, time and again, in suppressing
and killing (political) dissidents (in Marichhjhapi, Singur and Nandigram).
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 41
the other hand, it can be extraordinarily violent (that is, in using violent means
and in violating the constitutional rights, legal provisions, and procedures) – all
of which cannot be solely seen as a response to the manoeuvring prevalent in
political society. The other side of this argument is that the law and rules can
be transgressed by powerful people for exploiting members of political society
or causing them misery and inconvenience (for example, the encroachment
of village and forest land by the mining companies in Bellary in Karnataka;
diversion of PDS rice, etc.). We also know that in the face of resource scarcity
and other impediments, the actors, including both powerful people and
members of political society, practise jugad, that is, they arrange things for
themselves. It is also possible to provide alternative explanations for the post-
colonial state’s tolerance of violation of (public) property rights, particularly
in the context of the informal economy. Barbara Harriss-White (2009, 155)
provides such an alternative argument:
The state’s relation to PCP [petty commodity production] is both
ambivalent and contradictory – simultaneously endorsing actions which
destroy PCP, protect it, promote it and permit it through enforcement
failures and neglect. First, the state destroys PCP by means such as
physical eviction and by displacement as a result of promoting capital-
biased technology. Second, it subsidizes and promotes the reproduction
of small enterprises not through production but through whatever
infrastructural and welfare/social sector interventions are aimed at
sustaining the households involved in it. Third the state promotes
production by small enterprises not just with self-help groups and
by permitting a mass of more or less experimental micro fi nance
arrangements but also by condoning and not policing the onward
lending of ‘formal’ credit on unregulated terms and conditions
which prevent the borrowers from accumulating. Fourth, to prevent
mass unemployment, widespread malnutrition, etc., it implements –
more or less exiguously – policies that prevent the destruction of
small scale production, trade and services. In so doing it creates small
enterprises it cannot regulate and incidentally also restricts accumulation.
Its infrastructural responsibilities to employers may be avoided if
production is outsourced to petty producers. It does not enforce laws
through which the super-exploitative advantage of petty production
would be abolished. Nor does it enforce fi scal measures that would
threaten through taxation the nutrient-bed of petty production. So
PCP also thrives through neglect because the small individual capitals
involved do not accumulate suffi ciently for the revenue from tax to
outweigh the costs of its collection.
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
42 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
These contradictory and indecisive – and perhaps pragmatic – approaches
of the state indicate a predicament which underlines the power relationships
in a post-colonial country. This predicament has been conceptualized as the
condition of ‘dominance without hegemony’ by Ranajit Guha. Guha defi nes
hegemony within a fi eld of power, that is, a ‘series of inequalities’ or ‘unequal
relationships’ (Guha 1998, 20), as ‘a condition of Dominance (D) such that, in the
organic composition of D, Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C)’ and ‘hegemony
operates as a dynamic concept and keeps even the most persuasive structure
of Dominance always and necessary open to Resistance’ (ibid., 23, emphasis in
original). ‘Dominance without hegemony’ is the condition wherein persuasion
never manages to outweigh coercion, that is, coercion becomes explicit in
the formation and operation of power relationships. It is this condition that
propels the development of strategies of co-optation and negotiations, in an
attempt to defer or modify the (often inevitable) application of force.
In the Indian context, the bourgeoisie never loses interest in the accumulation
of capital, yet adopts various strategies to dispel the antagonisms it faces in that
process and negotiates with certain impediments. Does the Indian bourgeoisie
manage to persuade ‘the people’ to facilitate the process of accumulation or
does it ultimately depend on the application of force, or a mix of both? This
question returns in the context of the recent economic transformation in
India, on which Chatterjee published two articles in 2008.
In the fi rst article, Chatterjee (2008a) engages with the political economy
of the recent economic transformation in India to delineate the changing
relationships among the dominant groups. Here, the central problematic is the
sole ascendancy of private industrial-corporate capital in India to the position
of hegemonic domination which is accomplished with the ‘connivance’
[in my words] of the ‘urban middle classes’ – ‘the sphere that seeks to be
congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil society’ (Chatterjee
2008a, 57) – and the parallel decline of the ‘agrarian bourgeoisie’ (ibid., 56).
Such ascendancy of industrial-corporate capital is rendered possible through
‘primitive accumulation’, namely, ‘the dissociation of the labourer from the
means of labour [i.e. production]’ (ibid., 54) and the attendant transfer of
those means of production to the capitalists. Chatterjee thinks that political
society again becomes a signifi cant fi eld of contestation and interventions in
this new context: the need to reverse the effects of the ‘primitive accumulation’
necessitates that the governmental agencies engage with political society to
distribute the benefi ts, following the modality described above. But this
contestation has been part of the ‘passive revolution of capital’ right from
the beginning of the career of the post-colonial state, as can be gleaned from
Sudipta Kaviraj’s critique (which is seen from the standpoint of the state).
Kaviraj’s critique of ‘passive revolution’ is predicated on the proposition
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 43
that ‘the state in India is a bourgeois state’ (Kaviraj 1997, 48), which ‘helps
in capitalist reproduction’ (ibid., 49 and passim), when capital on its own
cannot expand through market transactions and, therefore, depends on ‘the
legitimized directive mechanisms of the state’.
Kaviraj observes, ‘The Indian capitalist class exercises its control over
society neither through a moral-cultural hegemony of the Gramscian type,
nor a simple coercive strategy on the lines of satellite states of the Third
World’ (ibid., 51 and passim). Such a control is achieved through a ‘coalitional
strategy carried out partly through the state-directed process of economic
growth, partly through the allocational necessities indicated by the bourgeois
democratic political system’ (emphasis added).
The (capitalist) dominance over the society is achieved through the practices
of governance, which according to Kaviraj, ‘refers to the process of actual
policy decisions within the apparatuses of the state’ (ibid., 54 and passim). The
dominance is created by establishing sets of ‘vertical clientilist benefi t coalition’9
(emphasis in the original) between the ruling bloc and subordinate classes
through certain policies. Such an approach is concerned with the ‘calculations
of short-term political advantages accruing from policies’. The objective10 of
establishing benefi t coalitions is to ‘ensure that actual political confi gurations
do not become symmetrical to class divisions in society’.
Although one can argue, after Kaviraj, that creating vertical clientilist
benefi t coalitions is the logics of political society vis-à-vis capitalist expansion
and ‘primitive accumulation’, yet it will be diffi cult to normatively evaluate
it as a positive development (in terms of expansion of freedom). An ‘agency
argument’11 is not enough to salvage such an evaluation. This is because the
very condition of capital accumulation depends on creating such vertical
benefi t coalitions, which is a ‘social cost’ to accumulation, and such a
cost does not alter or threaten the course of capitalist transformation and
expansion (in an ontological and not a historicist sense, and thereby not
9 I will argue that this can be seen as the institutionalized form of the colonial idiom of
‘Improvement’, through which ‘the colonial rulers [used] to relate nonantagonistically to the
ruled’ (Guha 1998, 30, emphasis added).
10 Arun Patnaik offered an alternative argument. Patnaik (1988, 30) found the poverty
alleviation programmes and targeting the poor in the 1970s as the ‘state’s paternalistic
attitude to the rural poor’, through which the state ‘diffused among the poor peasants
its own organizational contradictions and tried to wean them away from the social
contradictions of the real life’.
11 I will argue that the question of agency in these discussions always arises ex post facto, at
the moment of attributing the credit (or autonomy) of the action to a particular subject.
The question of identifi cation and recognition of that subject is very much part of
the above objective. Therefore, to consider the ‘agency’ as a (starting) premise of an
argument is limited in explaining the case.
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
44 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
being a question of teleological transition). I will argue that such vertical
benefi t coalitions and para-legal negotiations simply constitute a factual
and descriptive state of affairs in the domain of power relationships, and are
bereft of any immediate normative problematization.12 Since interventionist
and transformational politics requires a normative evaluation, and the
signifi cance and purchase of political society depends on showing the actual
expansion of freedom of the members of political society, it is also diffi cult to
see any transformational potential of the development of ‘political society’,
parallel to ‘civil society’.
Let me summarize my critique of Chatterjee. The project of mapping the
differentiated political space or defending the communal way of life has not
been ultimately signifi cant enough for Chatterjee to develop a theory of Indian/
post-colonial democracy; on the other hand, the practice of transgression
of law, rules and norms in India has to be accepted. However, the point
is whether we can undertake any normative evaluation of this empirical
context and proclaim that it helps in realizing the rights and freedom of
members of political society. In other words, we need to question whether the
(political) sociological understanding of political society can help us develop
a philosophical understanding of democracy in India. Alternatively, if the
transgression of law has to be taken seriously, then we should be able to use
the concept of political society to underline the undecidability and aporetic
conditions present in constitutionalism and in the process of realization of
rights, justice and freedom, which provides a critique of the liberal theory
of democracy, that is, it shows the limit of democracy under the capitalist
system. This standpoint neither harbours a Marxist/anarcho-communitarian
suspicion towards constitutionalism, nor does it attempt to furnish a liberal/
modernist defence of the rule of law. This is what I mean by ‘political society
as critique’, which I elaborate below.
The context at hand is capitalist transformation, which requires a
reorganization of property relationships, mobility of capital, curbing
of labour rights, rationing of social benefi ts, grabbing of resources and
maintaining and enhancing of the ‘value’ (actually, price) of property
through urban ‘development’ and beautifi cation. Political society can
be a useful concept and an analytical tool to study the condition through
which antagonisms that were immanent or developed within this process of
capitalist transformation in a post-colonial country (that is, the new frontiers
of capitalist expansion and growth) are defl ected, deferred or nullifi ed.
12 One can develop this argument further by engaging with Jacques Rancière’s concept
of politic(al)s as ‘disagreement’ (1998, 2004), which necessarily involves such a
problematization.
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 45
The concept of political society, therefore, can be used to critique this post-colonial
condition. But that does not mean that we should overturn Chatterjee’s insight
and treat political society as a successful strategic fi eld of the dominant classes,
which is structured to overcome the problematic of ‘dominance without
hegemony’, that is, the development of a non-coercive and persuasive
political condition for capitalist transformation. Violence is embedded in
this process. Amita Baviskar and Nandini Sundar (2008) draw attention to
the application of force and infl iction of violence in contemporary India.
They argue that such an application of force makes civil society ‘not a
domain of hegemony’, ‘but of domination’ (ibid., 89), implying that the
division between and distinction of civil and political societies along the axes
of civility and legality is misleading.
If the concept of political society is to be treated as a critical tool, and
no ready transformational politics can be found within it, then the obvious
question is: How does one think about ‘the political’ and transformational
politics? Chatterjee’s critics see politics in terms of contingency and the
empirical specifi city of a struggle, and fall back on the ‘agency argument’.
They suggest that in order to appreciate contemporary subaltern politics, one
needs to study the cases of resistance (John and Deshpande 2008, 86), to see the
success in getting the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA),
the Forest Act, and the Right to Information Act (RTI) as an outcome of
people’s ‘own degree of organization and their increased ability to speak in
terms of the very law that is used to dispossess them’ (Baviskar and Sundar
2008, 88), and to look out for ‘spaces, which the ruling classes are compelled to
open up in an attempt to legitimize their positions of power’ so as to ‘(utilize)
[those spaces] with a renewed creativity by those fi ghting for a more equal, less
exploitative social order’ (Shah 2008, 81).
While replying to his critics, Chatterjee re-calibrates political society by
introducing two more concepts: ‘moral passion’ and ‘populism’ (populism is
defi nitely a new turn in his theorization). He explains:
It is mistaken to claim that the dominant and propertied classes any
longer set the standards of morality for society; rather, in a democratic
age, the moral passion of entitlement and outrage is on the side of those
who have little… (Chatterjee 2008b, 92 and passim)
The political dimension is seen in terms of ‘struggle’ (clash and confl ict) – not
by clarifying the negativity or antagonism at the ontological level (that is, that
which leads to the confl ict): ‘Since the intentions emerge from the arena of
politics, it goes without saying that they are shaped by the struggles between
rival groups and classes in that arena.’
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
46 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA
The character of the politics which emerges in this fi eld – a ‘fi eld created by
governmentality’ – is populist, and ‘populism13 is the only morally legitimate
form of democratic politics today’. Thus, it seems that Chatterjee stands by
his earlier claim that the ‘politics of the governed’ is ‘shifting the historical
horizon of political modernity in most of the world’ (Chatterjee 2004, 75).
This insistence on seeing political society as an innovative and promising
political development ignores the other possibilities of (progressive) political
interventions. The analysis of governmentality entails the study of a very
specifi c domain, namely the mode of application and transformation in
governmental rationality and power, and resistances to it. This does not exhaust
the possibilities of analysing other domains of power relationships and the
dislocating events within those, or of anticipating other forms of progressive
political interventions. These limitations are also inherited by the analysis of
political society as such. Thus, the concept of political society as a critique of
Indian politics is a much stronger position to defend.
Alternatively, we may adopt a different methodology to understand the
political and the transformational politics. We need to ask whether political
theory should always start with (a refl ection on) the state and civil society,
while trying to understand/question the post-colonial political modernity.
Instead of a statist/state-centric normative discussion, can we not begin with
the conceptualization of the social, explicate its ontology, and then proceed
from there to apprehend the quasi-transcendental conditions of possibility
and impossibility of political change?
Conclusion
I have argued in this paper that the concept of political society can be more
useful as a critique of Indian politics, rather than as an alternative normative
theory, which can only extend the criteria of recognition by the state. What
the concept of political society warns us about is that a certain section of the
society is marginalized and that their demands do not become part of
mainstream political articulations in civil society. Political society alerts us
about various strategies that are being developed, how people use the spaces
available in a democracy to raise/place various demands, and how those
13 In defence of ‘populism’, Chatterjee quotes Ernesto Laclau. But, I think, it is a
misapplication. For Laclau (2007, 2005), populism stands as a problematic of staging the
people within democracy, which is preceded by a Claude Lefort–inspired understanding
of power, which is empty (that is, there is a lack) at the core, and hegemonic politics is
practised in an attempt to fill or occupy that emptiness or lack. ‘The people’ becomes
the constituency constructed or is the locus in this hegemonic political practice.
This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.
POLITICAL SOCIETY IN A CAPITALIST WORLD 47
demands are dealt with in a piecemeal way to mitigate antagonism and
facilitate the ‘passive revolution of capital’. Yet, such strategies cannot fully
hegemonize ‘the people’, and force the bourgeoisie to resort to violent means.
Political society as a critique marks out the problematic of perseverance of the
condition of ‘dominance without hegemony’ and the return or the spectre of
‘the people’14 in a democracy.
Chatterjee reminds us that ‘governmentality always operates on a
heterogeneous social fi eld, on multiple population groups, and with multiple
strategies’ (Chatterjee 2004, 60 and passim). We have also seen that the politics
in political society is ‘necessarily temporary and contextual’. Thus, any
political intervention that wants to overcome this fragmentary and temporary
politics would necessitate an engagement with hegemonic politics, a process
of constructing a broader political movement beyond the fragmentary ones.
Programmatic issues are involved in such a transformational politics, but any
mediation on such political programmes cannot begin without an understanding
of the specifi city of the post-colonial condition and predicament, which in
turn, requires an ontological analysis. The outcome of such an analysis will
not necessarily initiate a transformation, but it will at least provide a critical
insight into various political processes.
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This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.
London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.