The Political Science of Development

DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION OR PUBLISHED COMMENT
The Political Science of Development

by
Paul R. Brass
Prepared 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 Development

Paul R. Brass
In 1963, Myron published an article that I regard as one of his most important
short pieces on Indian politics. In that article, he posited the existence in India of what he
called 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 denizens
occupied the Indian Civil Service, the Planning Commission, and the leading body in the
governing party, the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress.2 Myron
clearly thought carefully when he chose names for these two cultures. He rejected the
idea that one was a modern culture, the other traditional because, as he said, there are
aspects of both modernity and traditionalism penetrating both views,3 thereby
anticipating by a few years the Rudolphs book, The Modernity of Tradition.4 He chose
instead the terms, elite political culture and mass political culture. The former was
elite not only or even primarily in social background, but in its outlook which, despite
Myrons recognition that it contained traditional components, was modernistic and
rationalistic.
The elite culture was the mtier of the developmentalist elite determined to
develop and modernize India: its economy, political institutions, and some aspects of its
social customs as well. The mass political culture, on the other hand, was permeated
with traditional elements, but not wholly traditional.5 Its inhabitants occupied the
lower 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 its
political center in New Delhi, while the mass culture was expanding from the localities up
to the state legislative assemblies, state governments and state administrations.6 The
mass political culture reflected the social organization and attitudes of the bulk of the
countrys population; local politicians who inhabited this culture understood and knew
how to operate within the categories of caste, tribe, ethnicity, and local and regional
languages. The elite culture operated largely in English, had a vision for the country as a
whole, 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 in
opposite directions towards each other. He thought there was a danger to be feared from
such a clash, which might arise especially from the conflict between the utopian
elements in the elite modernizing vision and the orientation of politicians in the mass
Myron Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, in Myron Weiner, Political Change in South
Asia (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963), p. 114.
2
Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, p. 138.
3
4
Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development
in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
5
6
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Political Science of Development
political culture towards their caste, kin, and ethnic groups and the demands for
patronage and power 7 that emanated from them and their clients.
Myron was sympathetic to the mass political culture and the concerns that arose
from it while at the same time sharing the elite developmental goals for India. He
thought, however, that it was necessary for the governing elites to recognize that, in a
democracy, one had to modify ones utopian expectations to the realities of struggle and
demands emanating from below. He feared that, in its desire to modernize India as
rapidly as possible, the elites might be tempted to sacrifice democratic practices and
impose an authoritarian regime to deal with the inevitable crises that would arise as the
two cultures came into more direct conflict.
Myron was not alone in his awareness of this kind of tension in Indian society
and politics, which some observers also thought described the basic dilemma of the
developing, democratizing Third World. The general idea of the dilemma as a problem for
all developing countries was perhaps first articulated by Shils in his concept of the gap
between the national and the parochial cultures that existed simultaneously and in actual
or potential tension within all the developing countries.8 Morris-Jones also formulated a
similar conundrum for India in his trichotomous conceptualization of the simultaneous
presence 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 term
referred to those political persons in India who adopted the style, tone, and moral outlook
of Gandhi in their approach to Indian social, poltical, and economic problems.9 MorrisJones also was careful to assert that these terms did not necessarily reflect the existence
of sharply differentiated ideologies, world views, or cultures by his very choice of a term
to describe them. The term idiom carries the sense that these were ways of talking about
and articulating Indias problems and their solutions, which might or might not reflect
fundamental differences among those who had command of them.
There have been many other ways in which this simultaneous existence of
distinct, 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
7
Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, pp. 150-51.

Edward Shils, Political Development in the New States (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), originally
published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, II (1959-60).
9
W. H. Morris-Jones, The Government and Politics of India (London: Hutchinson University
Library, 1964)., ch. ii. Many commentators on Indian politics have since made effective use of MorrisJones 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 Gandhi
government--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 the
ruling party and the government at large comes not from established political parties but from individuals
who employ a saintly language of political discourse. JP did that in 1973-75, as did Gandhi during the
independence struggle. Jan Jagran, or the moral awakening of people, was what Singh embarked upon in
July-August, and on Gandhi's birth anniversary October 2 [1987] he launched the Jan Morcha (people's
platform) 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.
8
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complicated with the entry of British rule and European culture operating alongside. In
this view, there was then a double gap in contemporary India that was mediated through
two distinct processes, the Sanskritization process that Srinivas described and the
Westernization process that many social scientists and historians discussed. Washbrook
articulated a similar kind of dichotomy that arose during British rule as the British sought
to build the Raj as a modern secular state, whose principles came into conflict with
competitive ethnicity, status-derived privilege, religiously based personal law, and
caste mobilisation. British attempts to accommodate to some of these traditional
practices only complicated matters further, in some cases stimulating the very processes,
such as caste mobilisation, that secular institutions were designed to ignore or
transcend.10
After Independence, Nehru, whom Dua has characterized aptly as a great
mythmaker of political institutions, sought to maintain the secular institutions
established 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 an
authoritarian interlude to head off a boiling cauldron of discontent from below that
threatened her hold on power, substituting for the elite institutional culture a new culture
of illegalities.11 The restoration of the competitive parliamentary system in 1980 did not,
however, restore the secular institutional culture of Nehru. Instead there followed an
intensification of the crisis of political cultures in conflict, in which broadened bases of
mass participation made possible the mobilization of national constituencies while
simultaneously there was an expansion of regional electoral constituencies based upon
distinctive patterns of social and political organization and conflict based upon castes,
religious communities, language, and tribal groups. In the Rajiv Gandhi landslide victory
of 1985, in the aftermath of his mothers assassination, the plebiscitarian base that his
mother had built from the new mass culture prevailed for the time being,12 but did not
efface the local, district bases of power that continued to survive and to provide the core
political support for opposition parties.13
The Rudolphs too have articulated the concept of the gap between the two
cultures in their own way in their distinction between the forms of politics in India
expressed by organized interest groups that work primarily in institutionally defined
policy arenas and make use of expertise and lobbying skill, on the one hand, and
demand groups that rely more on symbolic and agitational politics. The latter, as the
Rudolphs describe them have become a highly elaborate political art form that speaks to
10
D. A. Washbrook, Ethnicity and Racialism in Colonial Indian Society, in R. Ross (ed.),

Racism and Colonialism (The Hague: Martijnus Nijhoff, 1982, pp. 164-165.
11
B. D. Dua, Presidential Rule in India, 1950-1984: A Study in Crisis Politics., rev. Ed. (New
Delhi: S. Chand, 1985), p. 407.
12
Harold A. Gould, A Sociological Perspective on the Eighth General Election in India, Asian
Survey, XXVI, No. 6 (June, 1986), p. 637.
13
Gould, A Sociological Perspective, p. 651.
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Indias indigenous political culture through specifically Indian type of tactics and
public dramas that are used to mobilize sometimes huge crowds of demonstrators.14
Finally, the gap has also been articulated in postmodernist form, using the
Foucauldian term, discourse. In this formulation, contributed by Kaviraj, there is an
upper discourse in India, articulated by the ruling modernist elites and a lower
discourse that is indigenous. The former is a secular, liberal, rational, enlightenment
discourse derived from the West, the latter is not clearly specified except that it is
popular. The problem of the gap that Kaviraj sees is one of incoherence between the
upper and the lower; that is, the very terms used by the Nehruvian elites were
incomprehensible to the lower orders. Kaviraj does not refer to the lower orders in Indian
society in terms of caste or ethnicity for, following Benedict Anderson, he sees them as
merely imagined, having nothing objective about them. Indeed, the whole picture that
we have of Indian society is a construction of British Orientalism. Kaviraj, joining the
ranks of Nandy, Madan, and Chatterjee, seeks a new discursive framework for analyzing
Indian society and politics. He criticizes the inadequate theory of modernisation worked
out by Parsonian developmentalists15 and the blundering inadequacies of modern
American development theory.16 Unfortunately, Kaviraj and his colleagues offer nothing
intelligible to take its place, except such phrases as the recovery of religious tolerance17
in India. In fact, Kaviraj himself bemoans the absence even of an indigenous vocabulary
for making sense of the political world of contemporary India.18
But, in fact, there is a kind of indigenous vocabulary to make sense of Indias
political world to ordinary Indians. It is a vocabulary that draws upon the religiomythological history of India, that draws its symbols from Indian epics and the deities
that are depicted therein. 19 Moreover, it manages to combine this vocabulary with a
modernist outlook that challenges the secular ideology that was dominant in India during
Nehrus lifetime, proposing to substitute instead true secularism for the pseudosecularism 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 own
critique of the Nehruvian developmentalist strategy, the strategy and its ideological bases
were already crumbling. As Jaffrelot has put it, secularism and socio-economic
development were supplanted by entirely different values in the nation's political
14
Lloyd I. and Susanne H. Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian
State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 252-253.
15
Sudipta Kaviraj, On State, Society and Discourse in India, in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking
Third World Politics (London: Longman, 1991), p. 94.
16
Kaviraj, On State, Society and Discourse, p. 97.
17
The phrase comes, of course, from Ashis Nandy, The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery
of Religious Tolerance, in Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in
South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 69-93.
18
Kaviraj, , On State, Society and Discourse, p. 96.
19
On this matter of the effective (mis)use of central cultural icons from Indias religiomythological repertory, notably the Ramayana, see especially, Richard Davis, The Iconography of Rams
Chariot, find citation and Sheldon Pollock, Ramayana and Political Imagination in India, Journal of
Asian Studies, LII, No. 2 (May, 1993), 261-297, citation from p. 262.
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discourse, and the Congress itself appealed to ethno-religious sentiments.20 Although I

do not accept the argument sometimes made that Nandy, Madan, Chatterjee, and Kaviraj
are crypto-Hindu nationalists,21 the problem is that they offer no serious political
alternative, no sound basis for critique of the political and social crises through which
India is passing today, nothing substantial to counter the rise of militant Hindu
nationalism and its leading organizations today: the BJP, the RSS, the VHP, and the
Bajrang Dal.
In the remainder of this paper, I want to argue that there has indeed been an
intellectual gap in our approach to Indian politics that derives from the developmentalist
perspective, which was reflected also in Myrons work. At the same time, I want to
suggest how Myron made a significant move away from the developmentalist framework
in his last book on India and how we may move further away from that framework and
modify the methods that we have used to analyze Indian society and politics in order to
better comprehend what is happening in India today. My argument, in brief, is that the
political science of development has itself been implicated in the developmentalist
framework of Indias political elites. Further, despite the rhetoric of socialism that
accompanied that framework under Nehru, both the practice in India and the development
theory that justified it, were fundamentally conservative. The conservative elements in
the developmentalist framework comprised an ideology of state-exaltation, arising out of a
fear of disorder that I have analyzed elsewhere or, as Inden has put it, an orientation
towards the maintenance of order and towards elimination of the causes of unrest.22 So
implicated were we in the developmentalist goals of Indias elites that we failed to
provide an independent basis for critique that has become increasingly necessary as it has
become more and more obvious that those goals have failed to transform India into the
modern, industrial state of its elites imaginings, have failed at the same time to provide
for the basic minimum needs of its peoples, have failed to eliminate the causes of unrest
and 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 the
Hindu and Muslim populations of the country.
The remainder of this paper is divided into four sections. In the next three, I
provide examples from the literature that demonstrate the theoretical hold that the
developmentalist 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. I
have chosen for purposes of illustration three sets of examples. The following section
discusses statements about Indian politics that refer to the relationship between organized
20
Christophe 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.
21
A rather extreme and lengthy statement of this accusation against Nandy, in particular, has been
published recently by Radhika Desai, Culturalism and Contemporary Right: Indian Bourgeoisie and
Political Hindutva, Economic and Political Weekly [hereafter referred to as EPW], XXXIV, No. 12 (March
20, 1999), 695-712.
22
Ronald Inden, Embodying God: from imperial progresses to national progress in India,
Economy and Society, XXIV, No. 2 (May, 19 95), p. 263.
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demands and political development. (I have arbitrarily left aside for this purpose the even
more complicated issues surrounding the relationship between mass movements or the
Rudolphs demand groups and political development, but only because discussion of
this and so many other issues would fill a small book.) In the third section, I consider the
specific question of democratic development, again leaving aside here other very
interesting and important questions such as how democracy has been defined and the
meaning of such terms as participation with reference to Indian democracy. In the
fourth section, I discuss the questions of governance and governability as these terms
have been used by political scientists of India. Section five discusses some
epistemological issues under the rubric of research methods, particularly how the latter
have been implicated in the developmentalist discourse and how they have nevertheless
also in the past and may in future show a way out of the clutches of that framework. The
last section summarizes my arguments with a plea for a substitution of a stance of
critique of Indian society and politics for--and outside of--the developmentalist position.
Political Development and Organized Demands
The conservative, institutional-organizational bias in the political development
studies framework was reflected in Myrons second book on The Politics of Scarcity, the
weakest of his books on India, inferior both to his first on opposition parties and to the
one that followed it on the Indian National Congress. Among Myrons principal
concerns 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 and
economic development of demands made by organized interests.23 In the political
development framework, organized interests made demands that might endanger
modernization, public order, and economic development unless they were aggregated by
the political parties and by party systems. These demands constituted problems for
the polity that required proper handling24 or managing,25 which was another way of
referring to this aggregative-filtering process. Such demands could become quite serious
when they took an ethnic form.26
In 1987, in their book, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, the Rudolphs took a somewhat
different view of these matters from Myron. They examined more closely the internal
functioning of organized groups or, put another way, groups in the organized sectors of
the economy, particularly organized labor and organized capital and minimized their
potential threat to the processes of modernization, public order, and economic
development. 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
23
Myron Weiner, The Politics of Scarcity: Public Pressure and Political Response in India
(Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962), p. 11.
24
Myron Weiner Joseph LaPalombara, The Impact of Parties on Political Development, in
Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner (eds.), Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton, N.
J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 399-400.
25
Weiner and LaPalombara, pp. 430-31.
26
Myron Weiner, Congress Restored: Continuities and Discontinuities in Indian Politics, Asian
Survey, XXII, No. 4 (April, 1982), pp. 351-52.
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impact on national policy. On the other side, organized capital, operating in a

restricted, but protected economic environment, was largely dependent upon government
and could not and, in fact, did not oppose the thrust of the economic development
strategy of import substitution.27 Both organized labor and organized capital, in the
Rudolphs reckoning, emerged as the weaker parties in a triangular relationship with the
Indian state, which had the capacity to prevail over these and other organized interests
not only because the state was the strongest party, but also because it had won wide
acceptance for its claim that it has a special responsibility for nation building and
economic development,28 in other words, that it had legitimacy that overrode the
interests of organized groups such as labor and capital. In short, the Rudolphs, while
coining the term weak-strong state for the Indian state, took the view that the state was
strong enough to prevail against such interests.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Atul Kohli a few years later took a less sanguine
view 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 of
governability. Using Samuel Huntingtons framework and terminology, he argued that
there had been, in effect, a political decay of Indian institutions and an unwillingness on
the part of government under Indira Gandhis hegemony, to incorporate the growing
demands of power blocs in the polity. Although his book constitutes a considerable
indictment of Indira Gandhi and her policies and practices, he nevertheless takes the
position that she perceived - not without some justification - that such moves would
weaken the Center and thus both national integrity and the state's capacity to steer
economic development. She opted instead for strategies that involved the undermining
of democratic institutions,29 including the weakening of her own party, the Indian
National Congress, the premier institution in Indian political life. Adhering closely to
Huntingtons argument, while denying any normative suggestion implied by it, he
deplored this dismantling of the Congress and the weakness of other political parties in
India. Widespread politicization, he remarked, does put a high premium on a politys
institutional capacity simultaneously to accommodate the resulting demands and to
promote socioeconomic development. Well-organized political parties thus become
especially crucial.30
We have here, despite the differences in emphasis, an essentially congruent set of
arguments about what is important in Indian political development and how that
development may be endangered. Interest groups, organized or not, present demands that
naturally proliferate in a heterogeneous society such as Indias that is also undergoing
extensive politicization. These demands are presented to the state which, throughout
most of this period, made the crucial decisions affecting organized interests. Between the
interests and the Indian state stood the Indian National Congress, which had the capacity
27
Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, p. 25.

Rudolph and Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi, p. 273.
29
Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 16.
30
Kohli, Democracy and Discontent, p. 30.
28
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for two decades to aggregate, accommodate, and incorporate such demands and the power
to deflect and resist them when necessary. After the death of Nehru and during the long
period 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 now
lacked the capacity to deal effectively with them, thus producing a crisis of
governability. That crisis in turn cast doubt on the ability of the Indian state to
promote socioeconomic development.
Now, what is wrong with all this? As a broad summary statement of what has
happened in India during the past 50 years, it cannot be said that it is wrong. Neither for
that 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 normative
preferences to the contrary notwithstanding--that the state and its capacities to promote
modernization, maintain public order, and promote socioeconomic development
constitute 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 political
scientists of India simply to mention those processes of modernization and
socioeconomic development to be understood by their colleagues and vaguely understood
by their students, despite the actuality that neither these terms nor their sub-referents,
such as secularization, restratification, urbanization, and the like have any kind of
concrete reality other than those produced by manipulating census data. One can talk, for
example, of urbanization as an aspect of modernization and cite census figures to show its
rate, the sources of the migrating populations, and some of the political results produced
by migration of ethnically distinct migrants into an urban metropolis. One then also
attaches some significance or value to these processes for which summary terms are also
used, such as rapid or moderate for the rate of change, rural for the source of
migrants, interethnic conflict for the consequences of migration, and the like.
What is wrong with all this is that it is without doubt a conservative, statesupporting 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, but
they 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 relations
between 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 and
wants 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 gain
influence, respect, resources, and power? Is not democracy in fact working in India to
the increasing advantage of the lower orders? Let us see how this question has been taken
up in one type of answer to this question of democratic development in India.
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Democratic Development
While denying that their developmental model contained a built-in, ethnocentric
bias towards Anglo-American political practices as the end result of political
development, there can be no doubt that most of the developmentalists favored such a
result. Further, among India specialists--including Myron, of course--both democratic
development and the relationship between democratic practices and socioeconomic
development have been the central concerns of our research. Here, as elsewhere, there
was a consensus among practitioners in India--the politicians, on the one hand, and
political scientists, mainly American, on the other hand--concerning the desirability of a
secular, democratic state dedicated to economic development and national unity.31 That
consensus, 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 of
nationalist thought and political organization.32 While this consensus might seem
admirable from a liberal democratic perspective, it is further evidence of the absence of
distance between intellectuals and politicians, a distance that is necessary for critique.
In place of critique, Myron and other India specialists warned, preached, and
cautioned the political elites in India after Independence. Following Shils, our writings
were supposed to enlighten the political elites about the meaning of democracy, its
practices, and its dangerous shoals.33 Thus, Myron pointed to the danger that Indias
political elites might, in their search for utopian solutions to Indias vast problems, fail
to recognize the inevitability of conflict, the arousal of ethnic loyalties, the struggle
for patronage and power, and the essential presence of both political parties and
pressure groups in the democratic process. They might feel their plans threatened by
all these elements and opt instead for authoritarian solutions. 34 While Myron phrased
these points in neutral terms, they amounted nevertheless to advice to Indias political
elites. But, at the time Myron wrote these lines, Indias political elites did not need such
advice, for they had their own preacher and tutor, none other than Jawaharlal Nehru, who
understood all these points and was himself committed to the values and practices of
contemporary democracy and democratic development.
Nehru himself, however, largely escaped critical analysis. He was by far, among
all the leaders of the postcolonial world, the darling of liberal academic political scientists
in the West. Only during the last decade have his ideals and policies come in for
increasingly sharp intellectual critique, mostly from Indian social scientists of the
postmodernist persuasion. However, during virtually the entire period of his political
31
Myron Weiner, The Politics of South Asia, in Weiner, Political Change in South Asia, p.
39.
32
Jyotirindra Das Gupta, India: Democratic Becoming and Combined Development, in Larry
Diamond, et. Al. (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. III: Asia (Boulder, Col.: Lynne
Rienner, 1989), p. 59.
33
Edward Shils, On the Comparative Study of the New States, in Clifford Geertz (ed.), Old
Societies 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 from
scholars engaged in the comparative study of the new states to the students from the new states studying in
American universities to the enlightenment of opinion and policy there as well; pp. 7-8.
34
Weiner, Indias Two Political Cultures, pp. 150-51.
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10
dominance after the death of his rival, Sardar Patel, until the fiasco of his handling of the
war with China in 1962, Nehru faced no serious opposition to his rule and his ideals
either from within the Indian political process or from intellectuals, though there was
subterranean sentiment amongst the then politically weak militant Hindu nationalists
against him.
The current critique of Nehrus ideals and policies derives from two sources, one
indigenous, the other once again Western. The first is the political thought, ideas, and
practices of Gandhi, the second is derived from the contemporary postmodernist critique
of the intellectual apparatus as well as the ideals derived from the Enlightenment and its
enshrinement of Reason as the solution for all social problems, which Nehru embodied. I
will 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 minister
despite the fact that he certainly knew that Nehrus political goals and practices were
utterly incompatible with his own. Gandhis thought, ideals, and practices were antistatist, anti-party, and anti-industrialist. He proposed the disbanding of the Indian
National Congress and the creation of a new political order based on village selfgovernment and rural development. The makers of the Indian Constitution ignored the
total incompatibility of the two approaches to Indias political future and ignored
Gandhis 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 political
organization, 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 to
organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be
necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government.
This is not the place to discuss the history of the organization of such panchayats
in India. For purposes of this paper, it is sufficient to note only that they have posed no
obstacle whatsoever to the centralization of power, the development of the command
economy, and the proliferation of political parties and interest groups that Gandhi
opposed. There can be no doubt that here also political development specialists shared
the same views as the members of the Indian Constituent Assembly, namely, that a
strong state structure was essential to Indias development--political, economic, and
social--and that it was the Gandhian alternative, not the Nehruvian approach, that was
utopian and unrealistic, not to say obscurantist.
Although Ralph Retzlaff published a book on Indian village government in 196236
and others of us have from time to time commented on the functioning of those systems
of panchayati raj (village self-government) that have been introduced in several states in
India, the bulk of our writing has focused on the institutions associated with the modern
state and with its democratic development. Weiner and LaPalombara raised questions
such as whether or not mobilist single-party systems could be compatible with
35
Instead, they took the position that the two sets of goals were not incompatible; Granville
Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 48-49.
36
Ralph Retzlaff, Village Government in India: A Case Study (New York: Asia, 1962).
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democratic political values37 or whether or not, from the standpoint of long-range

democratic political development a bureaucracy subject to party patronage, even to a
certain amount of political corruption, is to be preferred to one in which, while it nicely
conforms to the Weberian requisites of a legal-rational authority system, is also by this
very reason in a position to distort the development of political parties and interest
groups and even to subject them to bureaucratic domination.38 Once again, though stated
in neutral academic terms, it is obvious that Myron at least preferred the development of
a 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 institutions
than 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 Indian
polity into what I have called a corrupt bureaucratic state.
Specialists in Indian political development have also repeatedly expressed their
sympathies with the problems faced by Indian political elites in pursuing the various
aspects of the development process. Once again, these sympathetic statements have been
made in impeccably neutral English social scientific terms, but they cannot be interpreted
otherwise than as sympathetic. The special overall problem that India and its political
elites are said to have faced from the start is the necessity of confronting all the
development problems at once instead of in a gradual sequence, as in the West. As Das
Gupta has put it, echoing the earlier theoretical development literature on sequences of
political development,39 democratic systems in developing countries have the unenviable
(my italics) task of simultaneously and rapidly developing the polity, economy, and
society. 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 assigned
work, a difficult or tedious undertaking.
Who assigned to Indias political elites this unenviable task? Well, they assigned
it 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 was
for long absent, though there has been ample critique of measures taken along the way to
implement it or deviate from it. We all reacted with shock and anger, reflecting our deep
commitment to the democratic development process in India, when Indira Gandhi
temporarily gave up combined development on the plea that the democratic part of that
development was undermining social stability and economic development goals and when
she, instead of pursuing the unenviable task, set out to dismantle the democratic system
of persuasion and replace it with an authoritarian mode of creating and enforcing public
assent.41 But we did not criticize the whole enterprise, not to mention its increasing
association with another form of development, namely, military development that led to
37
Weiner and LaPalombara, p. 425.

Weiner and LaPalombara, p. 434.
39
Leonard Binder, et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1971).
40
Das Gupta, p. 66.
41
Das Gupta, p. 73.
38
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Indias first peaceful nuclear explosion under Indira Gandhi and only last year to its
further development under the militant Hindu government at Pokhran. That this striving
for great power status was inherent in the development process from the beginning was
neglected along with its implications for the well being of the Indian peoples.
Far from criticizing the whole enterprise of Indias simultaneous development of
social, economic, and political resources,42 we heaped praise upon its elites--always
expressed in neutral social scientific terms--for adhering to the path of democratic
political development. Das Gupta remarked in 1989, for example, how Indias
democratic political development had not been constrained by the slow development of
the so-called social and economic requisites of democratic being. Indeed, Indian
democracy in this respect stood as a deliberate act of political defiance of the social and
economic constraints of underdevelopment.43 The adverbs and adjectives are missing
from 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 and
have seen present circumstances as less commendable have, nevertheless, done so from
within the same developmentalist perspective. I refer once again to Kohli--with whom I
have also been bracketed44--who coined in 1990 the term, crisis of governability for
Indias political condition in the late 1980s, and asked the question whether India's
democratic government [can] simultaneously accommodate conflicting interests and
promote socioeconomic development.45 It is, once again, the unenviable task that Indias
political elites may not, after all, be able to bring off.
Well, fifty years have passed. Have they brought it off or not? Whenever we
India specialists are asked to give an answer to this type of question of assessment of the
results of Indias experiment in so-called simultaneous development, we have what I
have called elsewhere a canned speech or a canned paper in which we recite the
achievements of the Nehruvian planning process, mostly in aggregate or abstract terms
such as the creation of a broad and diversified industrial base, the maintenance of the
Hindu rate of growth, the absence of famines, the rise of a new urban middle class, and
most 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 of
sanitation and hygiene in most of the country, absence of anything that can be called
medical 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, increased
communal violence, dowry deaths, and gender discrimination that takes the form of
extremely low literacy rates for women, victimization of females in the family with regard
to provision of food and medical facilities, persistence of caste disabilities, and on and on.
42
Das Gupta, p. 93.

Das Gupta, p. 95.
44
Stuart Corbridge, Federalism, Hindu Nationalism and Mythologies of Governance in Modern
India, in Graham Smith (ed.), Federalism: The Multiethnic Challenge (London: Longman, 1995), pp.
102, 111-12, 116.
45
Kohli, p. ix.
43
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As the reader will note, I wax more eloquently on the latter set of issues than on the
former, but most of my colleagues manage to maintain a more perfect equilibrium in their
canned articles and speeches.
In fact, I have been accused of being a prophet of doom and gloom, of painting a
picture of an India heading seamlessly towards catastrophe, as one of my critics recently
put it. What I want to say here and now, however, is that India is not heading towards
catastrophe: India is a living catastrophe and its people, including its intellectuals, know
it. But that line will get us nowhere but into endless, unsolvable arguments. More
important, from an analytical rather than a polemical point of view, I want to say that
this developmentalist perspective, this endless talk about simultaneous development, this
grand celebration of Indian democracy is an intellectual dead end that has us going round
in circles like this all the time. We have all been caught in it and cannot seem to get out of
it.
I want to propose how to get out of it: to show how Myrons best work points a
way out and how other kinds of questions may be asked that will lead us out of this dead
end. However, I want first to consider another set of terms that I have spotted trotting
along beside us that have led us still further astray.
Governance and Governability
Much of the writing about India by India specialists has been concerned with the
question 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 is
used, which is sometimes called good as in good government, though we rarely use the
opposite term, bad government. When we say good government, we usually mean a
government that is free of the taint of corruption, governs--that is, administers--the
government efficiently and convinces a majority of the people that it does so in the
public interest whatever its specific policy goals. The term govern is more often used
with reference to multi-party systems, where the question is sometimes raised whether or
not a particular combination of parties may be able to govern effectively or not. That
usage of the term also became quite prominent in India after--and ever since--the results of
the 1967 General Elections, as a consequence of which the Congress lost its majority at
the Center and in half the Indian states, introducing a period of unstable coalition
governments in many of them. It has also been used by political analysts in India with
reference to Congress rule at the Center both before and after the 1967 elections. For
example, one writer, remarking upon the diversity of interests contained within the
Congress, thought it explained why the Congress Party cannot adopt rational policies or
govern effectively; it has to contend all the time against itself.46 Finally, it has also been
used in the sense of self versus other forms of governance, as in self-government for
India after British rule and, in India itself after Independence, in the sense of restoration of
46
J. D. Sethi, India in Crisis (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), p. 55.
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self-governance to federal units whose government has been taken over by the Center for
a time, that is, restoration of its own governance.47
When talking about India, however, the terms governance, govern, and
governability convey a much broader range of concerns. It is used more often in the
conventional 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 to
British rule in India, which did all of those things. However, like so many other things
that were carried over from British authoritarian rule, the idea of governance was also
carried over into the new Indian democracy along with its opposite, namely, the
possibility that the country or its parts, that is, the former provinces--now states--of the
country might be misgoverned or mismanaged. This possibility was very much in the
minds of members of the Constituent Assembly, among whom the fear of disorder was
very prominent and who associated the notion of disorder with these terms,
mismanagement and misgovernance. As I have shown elsewhere, that fear was used to
justify the inclusion in the Indian Constitution of the right to make use of extensive
emergency powers, including the imposition of what is called Presidents Rule upon any
state whose government failed to maintain law and order.48
Dua, among others, has noted that Indias political leaders in the Constituent
Assembly in fact borrowed the concept of emergency governance from the Government
of India Act of 1935.49 But it was not just disorder that these political elites feared, but
especially a particular type, that which might threaten the integrity and unity of the
Indian Union.50 Provisions for emergency governance were justified because disorder or
misgovernance might lead to such a breakdown of order that Indias territorial statehood
itself might be endangered. Such concerns about misgovernment and mismanagement
could only have reflected another kind of continuity between the new governing elites and
the former British rulers, namely, an attitude of distrust of the ordinary politicians of the
country and a lack of faith in the ability of a mostly newly franchised population to check
the misbehavior of their elected governors.
There is also built into the concept of governance in India the underlying fear that
India itself is so big and heterogeneous that it might in fact be impossible to govern
effectively at all, a fear unstated but presumably felt by its Constitution-makers and
asserted openly by foreign specialists on Indian politics. It is sometimes argued also that
several of Indias states are themselves too large and heterogeneous to be governed
47
Gould, p. 634.
Paul 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 extreme
emergency powers in the Constitution remarked: Articles 275 and 276 give the Central Executive and
Parliament all the power that can reasonably be conferred on them in order to enable them to see that law
and order do not break down in the country, or that misgovernment [my italics] in any part of India is not
carried to such lengths as to jeopardise the maintenance of law and order. It is not necessary to go any
further. [Pandit Hirday Nath Kunzru in India, Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report, vol. IX
(July 30, 1949 to September 18, 1949) (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1967), p. 156.
49
Dua, p. 5.
50
Dua, p. 11.
48
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effectively and efficiently by a single government and should, therefore, be split up into
much smaller units.51
The most striking assertion of the question of whether or not India as a whole
could be governed at all was made by Selig Harrison in 1960.52 It has been reasserted
most recently by Kohli who has remarked that the area that is now identified as India
was never easy to govern and has in recent years, in fact, become difficult to govern.53
However, unlike Harrison, who was raising the underlying fear of early Indian nationalists
that the country might disintegrate, Kohli means by govern, the states capacity ...
simultaneously to promote development and to accommodate diverse interests, 54 the
simultaneous development question once again. He argues even more strongly that the
great fear of disorder of the Indian constitution-makers has materialized, that political
order in contemporary India has, in fact, broken down.55
It needs to be noted also that the way in which the term governance is used in
the literature on Indian politics separates it from democracy. Thus, Manor refers to the
political awakening that has occurred in recent years among India s disadvantaged
groups, which he argues has made India both a more genuine democracy and a more
difficult country to govern. Manor means by the latter that conflicts have become more
difficult to manage. What has made matters especially difficult is that, as this
democratic awakening has taken place, political decay of Indias principal political
institutions, those of the state as well as the Congress, has taken place.56 Huntingtons
shadow is here again, obviously, with his formula for democracy as a regime defined by
the autonomy of its institutions from social forces and, as well, his formula for disaster
arising from the imbalance between participation/social mobilization and
institutionalization.57 This formula, of course, eliminates the self from governance,
ignores the possibility that self-governance may only become possible through political
disorder, the dismantling of institutions, the displacing of old political elites by new ones,
and the articulation of a new political formula that better reflects the aspirations of the
formerly disadvantaged.
This formula also eliminates the human and the humane, as Kothari has put it
in his poignant and powerful essay, from governance. Kothari argues in a paradoxical
formulation that not only in India, but globally, governance has been usurped by
governments and further that governments have been taken over by corporate interests
and the military-technocratic order, and by the ideology of national interest and national
51
E.g., see V. M. Dandekar, Unitary Elements in a Federal Constitution, EPW, XXII, No. 44
(October 31, 1987), 1870.
52
Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University
Press, 1960).
53
Kohli, p. 3.
54
Kohli, p. 5.
55
Kohli, p. 14.
56
James Manor, Ethnicity and Politics in India, International Affairs, LXXII, No. 3 (1996),
pp. 471-72.
57
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1969).
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security. 58 Although the first part of the statement is paradoxical, it is as clear as can be
and means what I have just said, that the self, meaning the people, has been taken out
of the term governance, and, further, that governments no longer rule humanely in the
interests of the people but in the interests of multi-national corporations in which the
good society has become one in which happiness is identified with possession and
utilization of the latest technological devices in a world made safe for those who posses
and use them by a state whose primary concern is not even governance but the mere
protection 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 these
lines, but rather was at once a victim of the new global order and an increasingly eager
participant in it, creating its own internal victims among the poor and disadvantaged, that
is, the vast majority of its own citizens. In this new world order, it seems, there are really
no citizens, only beneficiaries and victims, those with influence and those with none.
Kotharis call is for a return to humane governance, including a concern for
human rights and ethical imperatives, for the recovery of the human, the good, and the
just.59 In restoring such a conception and form of government, the intellectuals have a
role to play, which includes exposing misgovernance and oppression, creating a
knowledge base for transformative politics and democratic governance, and identifying
themselves with the victims of history and with the democratic movement waged on
their behalf. Instead of playing the role of rationalisers and legitimisers of existing
political forms, presenting a vision of the future derived from developmentalist
perspectives for the benefit of the people, their role should be to listen to the people and
build that knowledge base from what they themselves hear from the people.60
I will come back to the issues raised by Kothari in a moment, but will say now
only that Kothari too has been caught in the discursive framework of the term,
governance, which presumes an abstract entity above the people that will somehow
govern better, that is, more humanely, in the interests of the people. For reasons that
will, I hope, become clear in a moment, I do not believe that there can be any such form of
governance.
However, I want to refer first to another source for the contemporary usage of the
term, govern, namely elite theory and the arguments that have surrounded it. In
classical elite theory associated with Mosca, Michels, and to a considerable extent
Lasswell as well, democracy cannot exist in reality. The idea of democracy itself is
merely a political formula in the modern age that hides the reality that all large-scale
organizations, including the state and political parties that vie for power within it, are
oligarchies controlled by elites who govern in the name of the people. Those elites cannot
be 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 revolutionary
movement, the end result can only be the reestablishment of some form of elite rule or
58
Rajni Kothari, State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance (Delhi: Ajanta,
1989), p. 1.
59
Kothari, p. 2.
60
Kothari, pp. 13-14.
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governance. The reigning democratic theory in contemporary American political science

associated with the name of Robert Dahl departs from this theory only to the extent of
denying the inevitability and the reality in the United States of the argument that a single
elite always rules. Dahl instead argues that the struggle of interests and parties in the
United States produces a pluralist rather than an elitist distribution of power.61 But
Dahls polyarchal democracy remains itself an elitist form of rule in which the
participation of the people consists primarily in the act of voting.62 It is fully consistent
with the Schumpeterian redefinition of modern democracy as rule by elected elites.
Elite theory in its early phase constituted a sharp critique of then existing regimes
that claimed to be democratic. In its contemporary form, however, it constitutes a
justification for such regimes. In neither form is elite theory fully adequate to
comprehend the functioning of contemporary regimes of symbol manipulation in societies
whose lives are controlled and disciplined in great detail by multi-national corporations
rather than by governments, such as the United States, or of corrupt bureaucratic
developmentalist regimes such as Indias. There remain nevertheless several aspects of
early--not late elite theory--that remain superior to the developmentalist paradigm as well
as to critiques of it such as Kotharis. First is the very recognition that there is an
inevitable tendency for elites to emerge in all societies, in all social movements, in all
formal organizations, and in the agencies of the state themselves. Second is the
recognition that elites and governments rule, govern under the guise of a political
formula in which they may or may not themselves believe, but which provides a
justification for their rule that sustains them in power as long as most of the people
believe in it. Third is the notion that political struggle in modern regimes that operate
under the political formula of liberal democracy is a continuous engagement of social
forces.
If we apply this scheme in its bare bones to India, one can say with a fair degree
of summary accuracy that, in the early years after Independence--throughout the Nehru
period, in fact--India was ruled by an upper class, upper caste elite whose political
formula was the very developmentalist ideology that I have been discussing so far in this
paper. During those years, the struggle of social forces was contained primarily within a
ruling 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 at
the Center and in the states, particularly the ministries, departments, and public sector
undertakings, which they gradually converted into increasingly bountiful sources of
corrupt income. In the meantime, as we all know, what is called the basic human needs of
the 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 selfserving, gradually also new social forces containing in their midst new sets of elites began
61
Citation is from the characterization of Dahls concept of power in Stewart R. Clegg,

Frameworks of Power (London: Sage, 1989), p. 53.
62
Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
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to challenge the old order, but not its corrupt foundations in which they all wish to share
or control themselves or divide more equitably. Simultaneously also, as the old
institutions declined and the old elites lost their bases of power, so did the political
formula under which they governed, whose key terms were modernization, development,
secularism, and socialism. In their place, the ascendant political formula contains the
terms 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 in
government, law and order, and respect for India in the world of nations. Some of these
terms are carry-overs that were contained within the old political formula, some are
distortions of it, some are outrageously false in their implications, though widely believed
(e.g., that BJP politicians are less corrupt than others). But those who have articulated
the new political formula themselves come predominantly from the elites that dominated
India during the Nehru period. On the other side, the rising social forces and the elites
within them adhere to elements of the old political formula to which they have added the
demands for equality, economic betterment of the lower castes and classes, and rule by
the real majority (the bahujan in the party called the Bahujan Samaj Party).
These rising castes and classes and social forces are challenging in India a part of
the wider notion of governance: who can govern; what governing is; what or who is
governed.63 The militant Hindus, however, are challenging all three parts of this
particular statement of governance. The rising backward and lower caste movements are
saying: you Brahmans and other upper castes are not going to govern us any longer; we
are now going to govern. But they have no notion of what governing is or what or
who is governed.
The militant Hindu politicians, on the other hand, are saying: you pseudosecularists and appeasers of minorities are not going to govern any longer; only those who
declare themselves to be Hindus are going to govern. They are also saying that we know
better 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 the
great Hindu family, and we will maintain law and order, in respect to all of which you
others have failed at the risk of critically endangering the country and the nation. They
are also redefining what or who is governed. The what is a united India, free from the
conflicts and disorders among its peoples that have divided it till now. The who is the
undivided Hindu nation that is to include Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, all Hindu castes and
classes and sects, not that composite mixture of cultures that formed the nation of the
pseudo-secularists.
It should be obvious, by the very fact that it contains answers to all three
questions while the lower and backward caste parties and movements do not, that the
militant Hindu response is potentially the more powerful and persuasive one. The former
offers only the spoils from the existing state apparatus to those previously denied access
63
Colin Gordon, Government Rationality: An Introduction, in Graham Burchell, et al., The

Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel
Foucault (London: Harvester, 1991), p. 3.
64
Gordon, p. 7.
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to 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 others
it may be--that has a considerable appeal to the still-dominant classes in society, the
upper 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, and
that of the militant Hindus, however, are participating in a critique of the political order
that was created by Nehru and the Congress in the first two decades of Indian
independence and that has been falling apart for the past 25 years. They are joined in this
critique by several of the most respected intellectuals in India as well, such as Ashish
Nandy and T. N. Madan. This critique responds to another question, namely, how not
to be governed, that is to say, how not to be governed like that [italics in original], by
that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by
means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them.65
The answers to the how not to be governed questions are again different from
the side of the lower classes and castes and from the militant Hindus. That from the
former has already been partly noted above: we will not be governed by you upper caste
people as if we were inferior beings; we will not accept the leavings from your tables any
longer; we will have our share and our rights. And, we will not have our share and our
rights as benevolent gifts from you; we will take them through our own efforts and we
will take them from you, if necessary. However, the parties representing these social
forces 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 this
land without opportunities for the disadvantaged outside of government. They cannot
reject secularism because it is only through coalition among diverse castes and
communities, including especially Muslims, that they can achieve control over
government and government resources.
The militant Hindu response to the question how not to be governed is more
encompassing. 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 a
new India that is industrialized, technologically modernized, and militarily powerful
enough to overawe its neighbors in South Asia, to equalize its position in relation to
China, and to gain the respect of the Western industrial powers. They even claim to be
secular--and they are in a different, sophistical way: once all Indians declare themselves to
be politically Hindu, all will be treated in the same way. Those who do not accept the
political Hindu designation (particularly Muslims and Christians) are to be treated as, in
effect, non-Indians, non-citizens, who should go somewhere else, to Pakistan or to
England.
But there is also a more radical critique of the old political formula that comes
from some of Indias intellectuals and has been articulated also by Ronald Inden. That
65
Michel Foucault, What is Critique? in The Politics of Truth, ed. By Sylvre Lotringer and
Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 28.
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critique rejects lock, stock, and barrel the entire developmentalist perspective and the
secular political framework as well. However, while the critique is powerful, the
prescriptions are vacuous. It offers no sensible political alternatives beyond such phrases
as the recovery of religious tolerance, respect for the indigenous values and faiths of the
people, and the like. Such intellectual constructions have no power to confront the
militant Hindu ideology, whose leaders are as much or more in touch with the indigenous
values and faiths of the people and who know how to manipulate them to their political
advantage.
For those who wish to challenge the old order and the old political formula
without falling into the net of the BJP and its family of militant Hindu organizations,
something more is needed. Neither pleas for humane governance nor for respect for the
values 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 should
be the role of intellectuals in India and the West who are sympathetic to the need for
resistance.
The greatest failing of the developmentalist/institutionalist approach is that it
utterly lacks any basis for critique. Its last vestiges need to be utterly disowned and
discarded. 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 a
framework for the analysis of the relations of power in Indian society and of the
interrelations of state and society. We need to build a political ethnography, that is, an
ethnography 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, not
from developmentalist or anti-developmentalist abstractions. We need to begin with the
other 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 an
abstraction, 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 Amartya
Sen--but poverty as a way of life that one cannot escape and that dramatically constrains
ones abilities and relations with the non-poor. Second, and associated with poverty,
comes illiteracy: continuing, increasing illiteracy that makes a mockery of the idea of
equality in Indian society, especially for women whose illiteracy rates are very high
indeed. Third, comes inequality itself: the persistence at all levels of Indian society-outside the most Westernized--of relationships that emphasize difference and deference
of the low to the high. Fourth, comes violence: from the violence of everyday life against
women in the family to the violence against the poor and other unprotected persons
perpetrated by the police in police stations and in the countryside to the criminal violence
of so-called Hindu-Muslim riots, which are often in fact pogroms against Muslims in
which the police are participants or quiet bystanders. Fifth, comes corruption: pervasive,
systematic, graded, corrosive of all institutions and agencies in Indian society in which all
are 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 country
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from 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 this
population approaching one billion means. One has to keep before ones eyes what one
sees every day in India and that one tends to forget almost instantly as soon as one settles
into the seats of the departing flights: people living in garbage dumps on the outskirts of
cities from which they scavenge their food and clothing; children lying listlessly on the
ground outside rural medical dispensaries where they have come because they have a flu
or stomach ailment or perhaps something more serious and life-threatening, their bodies
covered with flies from head to toe and no one there or interested in or capable of
attending 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 to
beat them because they have made some minor traffic error; old Muslim men walking up a
hill to tell the mufti at the end of riot curfew how they were beaten by police, their beards
grabbed and pulled, how they have lost sons in the riots; women telling their stories of
husbands, sons, and brothers killed in the same riots; men sitting listlessly in government
offices doing absolutely nothing hour after hour, day after day; the rich, privileged, and
powerful sitting comfortably in their new bungalows, their five-star hotel suites, their
restaurants, oblivious to all the above and prepared to deny that any of it actually exists
in 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 of
cars, accompanied by smart-stepping black cats who rush out to open their doors and
surround them with their automatic rifles until they are safely inside their huge
bungalows. I have many other such images in my minds eye gathered over 38 years of
personal observation, some of them too noisome to mention in print, which the phrase
absence of sanitation does not capture even euphemistically. To refer to such things in
a scholarly paper is to immediately elicit the following responses: Mother India, drain
inspectors report, what about conditions in the U.S.A.? You have spent too much time
in Uttar Pradesh.66 Or simply silence.
But I am not interested in the shock value of these images for their own sake, but
rather as a spur to new research on India that carries forward some of the empirical
methods of Myron to myriad areas yet untouched, but with the intellectual baggage of
development theory, the institutional approach to Indian politics, and the fulsome praise
of Indian democracy banished from the field or at least to some reservation where it
may be preserved as an example of an outmoded practice. Let me now, therefore, refer to
66
This 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 the
largest political unit in India; 3) the living conditions of most of its people are at approximately the same
level as the rest of north India and parts of eastern India as well; 4) although living conditions in some
other parts of India are somewhat better in some respects, they are not so much better anywhere as to set
them so far apart from U. P. as to place them in some other world. Further, I have done research and
travelled in other parts of India as well, especially Bihar where I did research off and on for about ten years,
Punjab, Gujarat, and Madras.
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what we have learned from Myrons life work in India, what remains of lasting and, I
believe, of permanent value, and how Myrons methods may be turned in different
directions to serve other purposes.
Methods
Myrons principal method of research was the in-depth personal interview, at
which he was a master. I know of his mastery not only because of the reports of his
interviews that he has included in some of his work, but from personal observation of his
conversations over the years with others, which themselves could sometimes turn into
interviews. Myrons questions were precise, searching, probing, so penetrating that his
respondent or the person with whom he was in dialogue might break out into a sweat. He
intruded 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 us
India specialists here--and now my former students as well--have followed in his path of
using in-depth personal interviews as the primary source of political knowledge of India.
Myrons use of his interview materials and, associated with interviews, personal
observations over the years changed somewhat. In his earlier work, the interviews were
mostly used as footnoted source materials in the preparation of coherent and factually
accurate accounts of events. Sometimes also he included extracts from his field notes as
part of his narrative accounts. In some of his middle and later work, however, especially
in Sons of the Soil and The Child and the State, he published long excerpts from his
interviews that conveyed the feelings and point of view of his respondents. In the case of
Sons of the Soil, his interviews brought to life the quality of the interactions between
cultural groups in conflict with each other, the cultural values they expressed, the
prejudices they harbored, and the identities they felt. These interviews added
authenticity 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 earliest
work in several respects, Myron added photographs to supplement his interviews.67
Insofar as the interviews are concerned, however, there are two other major differences
between the ones reported here and in his other work. One is Myrons own presence in
them. Myron was also present in his earlier interviews, but his presence here is
different, almost blatant. In Sons of the Soil, he listened sympathetically to his
respondents and did not challenge them. In The Child and the State--and this is the
second difference--he challenged his respondents, contradicted them, even humiliated
them by demonstrating to them their own ignorance of their own responsibilities and the
laws governing their duties. In short, Myron was personally involved in an issue on
which he had strong feelings and it came out in his questions and his responses to answers
that he knew to be false.
67
Which, however, like most photographs of India--especially those in Kodachrome--belie what we

wish to convey. In Myrons black-and-white photographs, smiling, happy-looking children apparently
enjoying their work in stark contrast to Myrons accounts of the conditions under which so many of them
worked, and oblivious to the deprivations--particularly of education--from which they suffered or would
suffer in future because of their work.
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From 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 engaged
in thick description, for he was always on the move from person to person and place to
place asking--epistemologically speaking--one question over and over again: Why? He
sought causes by asking clear, usually precise questions (though some of them that arose
from the developmentalist perspective were not really answerable). These why
questions 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 puzzle
to be solved through a survey of comparative conditions in other parts of the world or in
different parts of India. Why does India have a multi-party system? Why have the
reactions to migrants been more acutely hostile and nativist in some regions than in
others, and toward some but not all migrants?68 Why did government commissions
reviewing child labor and education policies as recently as 1985-1986 not call for
compulsory education or for legislation to abolish child labor?69
Myron 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 were
usually tested against comparative experience. If a respondent or the documentary
evidence gave a particular answer, Myrons next question to himself was: Does this hold
up elsewhere? Myron sometimes also asked how and what questions, but mostly to
elicit further facts that could be used to answer the why questions. Myron had
complete faith in causal analysis and the ability of the comparative method of John Stuart
Mill--as filtered through into contemporary political science--to find true answers to
precise 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 book
as covering all the questions that might be appropriately asked to find out all we need or
want to know about political behavior. I have, however, just realized as I wrote the
previous sentence that the why question is not contained in the title. Yet, the second
sentence of the book also contains the statement: The science of politics states
conditions. And, on p. 207, I find the following statement.
The scientific mode of thinking proceeds by formulating a
theoretical model of how [italics mine] selected factors condition one
another, and confronts the theory with observable reality. [Lasswells
quotation marks.]70
What is the difference? I am going to pay less attention to the Who, What, and
When for purposes of this paper, though those words also have epistemological
68
Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 14.
69
Myron Weiner, The Child and the State in India: Child Labor and Education Policy in
Comparative Perspective. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press), p. 5.
70
Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (With Postscript (1958) (New York:
Meridian Books, 1958).
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significance insofar as they provide the reality that we describe to answer the why or
the how questions.
But does not the statement that the science of politics states conditions
eliminate the difference between the why and the how? Do we not know why
once we know how things happen? To some extent the statement does blur the
difference, but the processes of discovery are entirely different. The why question
seeks universal answers to precise questions for which answers are provided in either
straightforward, if, then propositions or in probabilistic statements. The questions, the
methods, and the answers are abstracted from the richness of reality, refined to
encompass only a small part of it, that part that is amenable to answer through existing
scientific methods. The how question focuses on processes, engagements of forces,
manipulation of symbols, and seeks full comprehension of a reality that includes
observable behavior as well as practices that are partly observable, partly hidden from the
view 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 own
practices.
Though the two methods are different in most respects, they do have an
epistemological meeting point, at which Lasswells definition of the science of politics as
the stating of conditions becomes apposite. That point is where the how analyst has to
answer the question: is the process you describe universally applicable? If not, why
should 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 how
answer 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 for
afterwards), and more attentive to the responses people give to questions rather than to
how satisfactorily they respond to a search for specific answers to the interviewers
questions. Though I fully acknowledge my debt to Myron and his interview methods, I
am in effect saying that, over the years, I have adapted it more and more to the how
question rather than to the why question. I still ask why did such and such an event
happen, but I have become more and more interested in the how as well as in another
question that I will discuss in a moment.
But first, I must note that there is another kind of what question that comes
into the picture here, a different what from Lasswells. By what, Lasswell meant
material and ideal benefits that accrued to the influential through politics. There is
another kind of what question that turns into a how question that I ask frequently in
my 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 not
understand or appreciate when I first raised it; in fact, he was nonplused by what I was
71
Gordon, p. 7.
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doing. Instead of taking the answers I got to the questions I raised and eliminating the
non-factual, the ignorant, the irrelevant, and the idiotic to find the right answer, the real
explanation, I decided to listen to and analyze for their own sake all the rubbish that was
conveyed to me in these interviews. I then moved a step further and sought to relate the
answers 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 at
a set of statements about riotous violence, including Hindu-Muslim violence.72 I also
extended the analysis to reflect upon the uses of such incidents of violence for broader
purposes in the Indian political system. That led me finally to the question of whether or
not there was a kind of hegemonic discourse that pervaded Indian politics that emerged
from the contested meanings of the violent events that I analyzed that in turn contributed
to the persistence of such violence. There were several other steps along the way that I
will not go into here that brought me finally to the epistemological question that I am
raising, namely, the meaning of explanation itself, the uses that social scientists and
politicians 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 more
certainty 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 further
implications to it. The first is that explanation implicates the social scientists as well as
the politicians, the journalists, and ordinary citizens on one side or another of the great
issues of the times, involves them either in maintaining the or a status quo or in taking a
stance against it. Perhaps this is what Sartre meant when he said that you are either for
the revolution or against it. But, there is one further implication that I think is a new
argument, namely, that the very act of explanation contributes to the persistence of the
social problems analyzed.
Examples? The authorities, politicians, the media, the intellectual public, ordinary
citizens, and last in the picture, social scientists and historians, have all been implicated
one way or another for the past 150 years or more in the creation and persistence of the
communal discourse that divides the vast Indian population into two large, more or less
united or potentially unitable, hostile, and conflict-prone communities, Hindus and
Muslims. The latter part of the statement itself is one explanation of the violence that
has been endemic between Hindus and Muslims off and on, with greater or lesser
intensity, in different parts of the subcontinent for nearly two centuries. What I am
saying is certainly not that. I argued against that position years ago. What I am saying
now is that this communal discourse itself plays a major role in the persistence of HinduMuslim violence, that it has been creating what it analyzes. Moreover, it is a pernicious
system of talk that has been created that has parallels elsewhere in the world, whose
consequences, if one takes the argument far enough, can be horrendous.
72
These remarks about my own recent work refer to Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the
Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Riots and
Pogroms (London and New York: Macmillan and NYU Press, 1996); and my book nearing completion on
The Production of Hindu-Muslim Communal Violence in Contemporary India.
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Here my answer begins to turn into a response to a why question that can now
be phrased as: Why does Hindu-Muslim violence persist in India? But it is a different
kind of answer to a question that Ashutosh Varshney, using Myrons methods, has come
up with. Like Myron, he asks: Why here and not there, why in this city and not that
city, both of which share characteristics that are as close as can be, with the main
exception that communal violence is present in one and not the other? Although
Varshney makes a persuasive case for his answers to the why question, his
explanations fit into a different kind of program from mine. Furthermore, his answers
ultimately are quite simplistic.
Varshney concludes, in his forthcoming book,73 with an argument that appears to
be a mirror image of my own. I say that the communal discourse pervades large parts of
India, particularly the north, and that there are certain sites in the country where HinduMuslim communal violence is endemic. In those sites, I have asked not only why this is
the case, but how riots happen. I have discovered that, in such sites, what I call
institutionalized riot systems exist that operate under the cover of the communal
discourse. Varshney, using Myrons comparative method, discovers that, in those cities
where Hindu-Muslim riots do not occur, there are institutionalized peace systems. It
would seem, therefore, that Varshney has confirmed my own findings and phrased them
in causal terms, in if-then propositions, in general statements, to wit: where riots are
endemic, institutionalized riot systems exist, which cause them; where riots do not occur,
institutionalized peace systems exist, which prevent them. There are further elaborations
of Varshneys arguments that I will not go into here, but their simplistic character arises
from the naive belief that the development of intercommunal linkages between communal
groups can really prevent riots. I will not speculate here on the policy implications of his
arguments 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 to
identify clearly and precisely the principal actors, agents, and institutions that are
responsible for the perpetration of communal violence and the uses to which such
violence is put.74
This is where the how answer differs from the why answer. I describe how
riots happen and how the communal discourse provides cover for them, the uses to which
they are put, and especially the uses of the explanations for them that are given after the
fact as well as the contribution of such explanations to the persistence of communal
violence. I say that where such systems of violence and such discourses exist side by
side, there is grave danger of corrosion of the entire social order, which cannot be headed
off by saying that the problem only manifests itself here and not there and, further, that
the dangers include--but do not necessarily or inevitably produce--holocaust, civil war,
73
Ashutosh Varshney, Civic Life and Ethnic Conflict: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven:
Yale University Press, forthcoming).
74
In contrast, Varshney and Wilkinson hardly mention the principal agents responsible for
instigating violence against Muslims in Indian cities and towns, namely, the BJP and the RSS, in some of
their already published research; I counted only three inconsequential references to the BJP/RSS in
Ashutosh Varshney and Steven I. Wilkinson, Hindu-Muslim riots 1960-93: New Findings, Possible
Remedies (New Delhi: Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1996).
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interstate war, fascism, and political disintegration. Further, I pinpoint specific

responsibilities for violence. I do not say that the communal discourse exists and nothing
can be done about, that things are better somewhere else, so we need not worry overmuch
from the point of view of the country as a whole, the system, national integration,
democracy and whatnot because of isolated pockets of violence here and there. I say that
the discourse provides a cover that justifies the failures of the authorities to act. To say
that intercommunal linkages exist somewhere else does not help to explain why
governments do not act when they know very well how to prevent riot--in those places
where riots are endemic--before they happen and to contain them once they get started.
Now, to raise another broad issue, my rational choice and game theory friends
have looked on much of my work kindly. None other than David Laitin has shown me
how he can convert my argument into rational choice statements. I can also convert my
arguments into if-then causal statements: riots follow upon the institutionalization of riot
systems; where a communal discourse exists, there will be violence, etcetera. But such
statements are not much use because they may or may not prove out in practice.
Moreover, they are beside the point.
This does not mean that I eschew comparison. On the contrary, once I arrived at
my main conclusions--in fact, as I was arriving at them--I began to consider their
generalizability. I thought of the Jewish Question in nineteenth and twentieth century
Europe and the Holocaust that answered the question once and for all. But I do not say
with the assurance of a Goldhagen--who has a different answer to a different question
about the Holocaust75--that the existence of the Jewish Question caused the holocaust.
I say rather that the existence of such a discourse as communalism and its association
with the idea of the nation-state in South Asia, with its affinities to the discourse that was
the Jewish Question, should cause us to look more closely at the former and consider the
horrifying consequences that have already flown from it, but which pale in significance to
what has occurred in similar circumstances in the past and could occur in future.
But there are other possibilities as well. The communal question in South Asia
may be relatively less dangerous than the Jewish Question in Europe. It may be only as
bad as the racist discourse in the United States, which contributes to the persistence of
racism in our country, which has contributed in the past no doubt to riots, but has not
threatened our system, our development, our democracy.
But I do not take comfort from the latter possibility. I say, rather, that all three
discourses are in their own ways pernicious and that the task of the social scientist is not
to convert their consequences into causal statements or merely to dissect them and
certainly not to justify them. It is to expose them to view and reveal the extent to which
they implicate all members of a society/state in part and some in full degree. It is to
remove ourselves from inside them, with all our why questions, ask instead how they
came into being and how we can make a start in defanging them by moving outside them
ourselves. We need to insert some explosive materials into the bottom of these talking
75
Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New
York: Vintage, 1996).
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edifices in the hope that others will begin to see that they need to be blown apart or shut
up.
I want to finish this discussion of methods by returning to the question of
comparison in the social sciences. I have shown how I have worked from the specific to
the general, not through controlled comparisons attempting to answer why questions,
but through processual analysis of the dynamics of violent conflict filtered through or
hidden behind the smokescreen of a communal question. I have shown then how such a
study of a specific type of violence and the discourse associated with it led me to
comparison with other apparently similar types of violence and the discourses associated
with them. I am reasonably confident that there are structural similarities among the three
discourses of communalism, anti-semitism, and racism. I present as a challenge also to
specialists on the latter two phenomena to reexamine the generalizations made by
historians and social scientists concerning the causes of riots and pogroms in Russia, other
parts of Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the world to look over the historical
record again and search for institutionalized riots systems in sites from Odessa to Los
Angeles, from nineteenth century Russia to twentieth century America, in other words, to
test my hypothesis.
But then, finally, I want to come back to the value of the case study, using the
how question, at specific sites, that is, to the question of area studies against its
alternatives in political science and the social sciences, particularly the imperial crusade
launched by rational choicers against area studies. What is the ultimate result of this
moving back and forth from the specific to the comparative to the general in my method?
It is not the search for uniformity so much valued by the rational choicers, which never
amounts to much more than a 20 percent explanation despite their extravagant claims that
they can explain even a whole, singular event through game theory. The ultimate result
that I seek is not this 20 percent explanation, but a fuller understanding of the singular-certainly not 100 percent, which is beyond human reach for so many reasons that cannot
be gone into here--but certainly more than 20 percent, though it is not a number that I am
after, but a clearer differentiation of the apparently similar from each other. Ultimately, I
want to know how dangerous South Asian communalism and institutionalized violence
are. I do not believe it is as dangerous as anti-semitism, though it does sometimes scare
me in the same way. I do think it is closer to racism in the United States, but I believe it
is more dangerous for many reasons which, again, I will not go into here because my point
is a methodological one. I want to know and to strive to find a place to put the Indian
communal discourse and its violent manifestations--not in a botanical classification
system designed as another great construction containing pigeon-holes into which various
discourses and types of violence can be placed, but in its present, immediate, historically
created (not determined), specificity. I want to consider the consequences for India and
for us of a communal system of talk, embedded in an ideology of the nation-state, which
is tending on a pathological course with the full technical apparatus of self- and otherdestruction in its hands in the form of nuclear weaponry, which is using--or finding useful
--the persistence of internal violence directed against Muslims and other ethnic, religious,
and tribal groupings for its grand designs.
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Conclusion
I began by arguing that Myron and all of us who have been writing about Indian
politics since the 1950s were aware of the existence of something like what Shils called
the gap between political cultures, political idioms, political discourses. We were all
also aware that this gap did not constitute an impenetrable barrier to communication
between levels in Indian society, that there was a certain amount of interpenetration
between/among them as well as discontinuity. What we were not so aware of or did not
know quite how to articulate was that this very gap was reflected in the distance between
the prevailing theoretical framework and our confrontation with the mass political culture,
the traditional and saintly idioms, the lower discourse. What some of us did and said
was simply that we had to junk the framework when we arrived in the field and find other
ways to relate our empirical work and our discoveries about Indian political behavior to
generalizations at the middle and lower ranges of theory in the discipline.
But that framework, the developmentalist framework--whether in its Almond and
Coleman guise or in the guise of Shils or the Social Science Research Council Studies in
Political Development or Samuel Huntington--has shadowed us for 50 years. Myron was
one of the central participants in influencing and formulating this framework. Moreover,
he sometimes sought carefully to make his own confrontations with the mass political
culture mesh with the prevailing theories. For example, in his important and massive
study of the Congress organization in the districts, published in 1967, he related each of
his case studies to one or the other of the crises of development. What remains
valuable till today from Myrons work in those districts, however, is not his contribution
to the theory of crises, but his ethnographic description of confrontations among new and
old social forces in politics in the second decade of Indian independence, a benchmark
study that will be consulted for as long as people are interested in Indian political history
and the organizational history of the Indian National Congress.
What has been greatly missing in most of our work throughout the past 50 years
has been an intellectual foothold--I will not call it a theory--from which to launch a
critique of Indian politics and the functioning of the Indian polity. We have been weak at
critique because we ourselves have been implicated in the propagation of the
developmentalist framework that is at the root of the developing crises in India and in
many other developing countries. It is not that many of us have not done good
ethnographic work that is relevant to theory. Myron did so throughout his career and
others of us who have followed in his path have also done so. But, for the most part, we
have ended by fitting our empirical work and our theories into a framework that continues
to implicate us in the great celebration of the wonder that is what we call Indian
democracy.
In his last book on India, however, Myron did in fact launch a biting critique of
one among the many blots on this Indian democracy: the persistence of illiteracy and child
labor in that country and the nearly total disinterest of policy makers, party leaders,
educationists, and others in doing anything about it. Myron launched this critique using
his same methods of asking the why question and answering it through careful
comparative analyses of how and when illiteracy and child labor were eliminated in other
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countries, including many countries more poorly situated than India. His ultimate answer
to the why question in this case was outside the developmentalist framework. It was,
in effect--and to put it in my words--that the persistence of illiteracy and child labor
contributed to the reproduction of the hierarchical social order of Indian society. So, we
learn something thereby about the relationship between the social order and the Indian
state, how the state controllers have maintained a myth, a political formula of democracy
while the great mass of the people lack the elemental basis for political and social
equality.
I have referred to my own work on communal violence as a form of critique of
Indian political behavior. I have used different methods and a different analytical
perspective from Myron, but there is a kind of family resemblance in the conclusions that
we have reached by different methods. I say that violence is endemic in north Indian
society, that it takes many forms and has many political uses. I say that it persists,
though it may appear to ebb and flow, because--if you will--there is a communal
discourse that sustains it and institutionalized riot systems in particular sites that
promote it. Further, I argue that the persistence of communal riots is not a function of a
developmental problem, but of a lack of will or interest (in both senses of the word,
interest) in stopping them. In fact, on the contrary, most political parties have many
times benefited from the persistence of riots and many local political leaders have thrived
on them. I say finally that this is another fundamental blot on what we call Indian
democracy, not only because of the violence itself, which is, of course, a great evil, but
because of the power relations that are sustained by the maintenance of systems of
communal violence and communal talk. I refer especially to the consequence of the fact
that communal riots are mostly in fact pogroms against Muslims. The consequence is
that Muslims constitute in many parts of the country, in effect, a huge body of secondclass citizens.
I mentioned above several other subjects that need more attention outside the
developmentalist framework: poverty, the myriad inequalities of caste and gender that
persist and sustain relations of deference and obedience in Indian society, corruption. To
that list should be added state terrorism, the intensification of a militarized form of
nationalism, and the virtual absence of any dissent in Indian society over 50 years
concerning Indias basic policies on the maintenance of Kashmir as part of the Indian
Union no matter the cost. The political aspects and implications of the wretched
university system in India and its consequences for the lives of students aspiring to
improvement of their life chances. The continuing victimization and displacement of
tribal peoples and the expropriation of their lands and livelihoods by corrupt state
officials in cahoots with local businessmen, police, and politicians in the name of
construction of great dams or the creation of forest reserves. The ongoing
criminalization of politics, business relations, and police practices and the consequences
thereof for present and future political, social, and economic life in India. The existing and
possible forms of resistance--not participation or turnout in elections--to the forms of
power expressed in all the relations between persons and social forces involved in all the
above. The appearance in India from time to time of a very curious, ugly, and
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disconcerting form of resistance, namely, suicide deaths, for example, of upper caste
students in 1998 in response to the decision of the V. P. Singh government to reserve
27 % of jobs in public sector enterprises controlled by the Government of India for
backward castes and, just recently, the suicide deaths of more than 300 cotton farmers in
the state of Andhra Pradesh.76 In each of these cases and many others that might be
conjured up as worth investigation and that appear in one form or another in the pages of
that great Indian magazine, the Economic and Political Weekly, such as, for example, the
stinking criminal justice system,77 in such cases the method of choice is that pioneered
by Myron Weiner: detailed, first-hand, empirical research through in-depth interviewing,
asking--as you choose--either why or how, but from a standpoint of critique rather
than of development.
76
C. Shambhu Prasad, Suicide Deaths and Quality of Indian Cotton: perspectives from History of
Technology and Khadi Movement, EPW, XXXIV, No. 5 (January 30, 1999).
77
EPW, XXXIV, No. 12 (March 20, 1999), p. 647.

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The Political Science of Development

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democratic political values37 or whether or not, from the standpoint of long-range

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Das Gupta, p. 93.

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J. D. Sethi, India in Crisis (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), p. 55.

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