Abstract
In Neoliberal Strategies of Governing India, Ranabir Samaddar engages with the crucial issue of how India is regulated in neoliberal times by situating it in the context of a recent history of post-colonial democracy. A companion volume to Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India, the book applies Foucault’s political thought, more particularly the notion of governmentality and biopolitics, along with a political economy lens to understand the modes and mechanisms that render India, in its neoliberal phase, workable.
Broadly, the discourse and practice of managing India is seen as aimed at promoting capital accumulation and bringing about a thorough neoliberal reorientation in the name of development. However, rather than viewing it as a smooth process, the book highlights the fault lines that result in innovative tools being devised and refined to deal with new contingencies. The nature of capitalist accumulation process, it is argued, continues to be ‘primitive’—marked by cruelty, ruthlessness, pillage and deception. The central argument is that though there is an instrumental approach to governance encapsulated in governmentality, yet, the terrain of democratic politics has also opened sites of contestation. The increasing mobilisations that invoke justice, coupled with inconsistencies in the regulatory framework, make ‘politics of radical democracy’ an ever-present possibility.
Part I of the book comprises four chapters that highlight how rights and development have emerged as governance tools to maintain a degree of coherence in society. At the same time, the section highlights the disjunctures that allow for radical possibilities to emerge from such an arrangement. Chapter 1 deals with the issue of Muslims, the largest minority grouping in India, from the vantage point of government rationality. The perception of the colonial rule about Muslims as a hostile race, striving to carve a niche for itself, is seen as guiding governmental reason even in postcolonial times which has meant regulation through development measures and downplaying identity claims. Despite such efforts at simplification, it is argued that the governmental reason is bound to come under strain when minorities would begin to speak and demand redressal from an intersectional subject location.
Chapter 2 of this section deals with the issue of hunger. It points to the existence of a situation of widespread ‘rightlessness’ in which certain sections of society are devoid of the foundational right to even demand their rights. The governmental response to mobilisations around welfare rights has been in the nature of ‘policy explosion’ in determining the scope and coverage of rights. Nevertheless, the author sees the language of rights as carrying weight in contemporary discourse. As rights-based campaigns act as ‘political revolts’ that provoke discontent and have increasingly begun to voice the concerns of justice as reflected in the ‘right to autonomy’. The author sees the struggles for autonomy by collective groups as an exercise in agency that has the potential to threaten the neoliberal governance set-up by opening up multiple fronts to be dealt with.
Chapter 3 discusses ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in the context of agitations against the land acquisition drive in Singur and Nandigram since 2007–2008. The developments are located within the framework of ‘biopolitics’ in which even basic economic issues are portrayed as threatening collective human existence thus requiring governmental care and intervention. The agitation in Singur is seen as symbolising a defining moment in the practice of protest politics as by invoking ethics of justice the land question was able to seize the remainder that is almost always left out in negotiations around law. The concerted and relentless assertion of demand for revocation of land acquisition not only enlarged the scope of protest but is seen as reflecting rise of, what Pierre Rosanvallon has called, ‘social majorities’ which are increasingly not dissuaded by the deficiency of ‘electoral majorities’. An important implication of the argument is to underline the potential of politics to transcend the logic of governmentality in a performative act.
Chapter 4 outlines the tension between politics and governance as reflected in the institution of a political party. The author points to a trend towards ‘governmentalisation of parties’ that began with colonial rule, in which there has been a shift in the role of parties from entities galvanising and organising masses around certain core ideological issues, to ones that adopt a more pragmatic approach. In a perceptive observation, the author argues that the conundrum can be located in the identification of politics with the existence of political parties as its essential guarantee. By implication it has also meant that rather than action-oriented mobilisations setting the terms of the discourse, it is now the discourses that decide the action. And political parties are increasingly involved in reconfiguring discourses while lacking inner party democracy. The chapter underlines the need to salvage politics from governance.
Part II of the book consists of four chapters that deal with the emerging social matrix of governance to aid capital accumulation. Drawing examples from the way insurgency has been handled in the Northeast, Chapter 5 argues that the hallmark of postcolonial governmentality which relies on the rubric of empowerment and participation is reflected in the Northeast in governance initiatives, such as territorial reorganisation, grant of limited autonomy and peace agreements that lack the genuine intention to settle the issues on the basis of justice. The result is a spiral of unending rounds of negotiations and agreements with each round circumscribing the terms of the discourse and at the same time generating new conflicts. The operational dynamic is explained from the standpoint of political economy where, on the one hand, the region is seen as a connecting link to southeast Asia. On the other hand, the existing state of affairs has given rise to a whole set of new actors—dealers, contractors, leaseholders and an administration that has a vested interest in the continuing impasse.
Chapter 6 discusses the political economy of the work environment, in the context of migration, growing informality and SEZs whose regulation has become necessary to promote capitalist accumulation. The neoliberal regime, it is argued, faces a perpetual predicament in which democratic impulses push towards recognising labour as citizens but accumulation requires a fluid and mobile labour force with all its vulnerabilities. Akin to Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement’, it is suggested that amidst marketisation, labour has to struggle to protect its socio-economic entitlements. It is the author’s contention that there is a need to go beyond the conventional idea of democracy by articulating a theory of ‘labour democracy’ to make democracy relevant and meaningful in present times.
Chapter 7 delves deeper into the contemporary model of accumulation which is seen as predominantly extractive in nature. The ready availability of labour, it is argued, has been made possible through a mix of both legal and illegal means. The inhumane conditions of work in the mining sector that employs migrants and comprises mostly illegal mining companies, in cahoots with the political class, leads the author to suggest that violence, bloodshed and barbarity that have been an intrinsic aspect of the process of primitive accumulation and unfolding of capitalism continues unabated. Official reports and guidelines in disregarding the political economy of migrant labour fail to locate the root cause and modalities of working of what the author calls ‘transit labour’.
Chapter 8 brings to light another characteristic feature of the neoliberal model of governing—termed ‘logistical governance’ by the author—which in its penchant for development is becoming increasingly concerned with physical aspects. Reconfiguring space to suit the needs of capitalist accumulation has necessitated creation of ‘walls’, ‘zones’ and ‘corridors’ which together symbolise the imperatives of demarcation, concentration and, at the same time, the necessity of linking regions and populations. Such visible manifestations of accumulation tend to co-exist with technology-mediated cashless modes to enable both surveillance and coordination. At a societal level, the new modalities of segregation and regulation are seen as militating against the ability to think critically about ones subject’s location in the grand capitalist venture and to come together to form a vibrant public sphere. However, Samaddar points to an undercurrent of crisis in instances, such as the failure of the Rajarhat new town project, the stalling of the growth momentum in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown, and inflation and currency devaluation, among others.
Part III of the book that contains the final chapter calls for revisiting and rethinking of ‘passive revolution’ as the frame of reference for analysing postcolonial democracy in a neoliberal age. In a reinterpretation of the idea of passive revolution, which is shown to be not so passive, the author suggests that a passive revolution can no longer be looked at as a situation of a ‘blocked dialectic’ in which governmental logic (thesis) incorporates and co-opts new forms of resistance (anti-thesis) preventing the full maturation of contradictions to a transformative level. Rather it has to be looked at from the perspective of ‘neoliberal capitalism’, the contours of which are discussed in preceding chapters. In such a context, passive revolution need not always blunt the revolutionary potential but in a conjunctural moment can usher in radical democracy. It is argued that, as migrants, slum dwellers among others make claims and counter-claims around ‘right to city’, this signifies the emergence of a new collective political agent.
The book brilliantly traces the change and continuity in the evolution of governmental reason substantiating with appropriate case studies wherever needed. It is suggested that both sophistication and ruthlessness have been central to the process of accumulation which is aided and abetted by governance practices. Most ramifications of the neoliberal turn are seen resonating in the urban landscape. By invoking Foucault’s idea of governmentality and Karl Polanyi’s double-movement the volume suggests how contestations are internal to the process of capital accumulation and that there is a structural and historical logic to the unfolding of capitalism. The mediation of governance allows the author to escape from any charge of determinism that a purely structural argument might have led to and is suggestive of policymakers acting, as what David Held would term, as ‘agents of strategy’. The unpredictability of politics, however, is seen as making crisis management difficult. The interface between governmental reason and contestation, it is argued, can have a transformative potential only if we expose the contradictions disallowing new modes of governance from silencing politics.
There are, however, certain omissions which are difficult to ignore. The rhetoric of inclusive growth which is the most recent avatar enabling the liberalising Indian state to take along class inequalities and disadvantage based on identity per se is not emphasised. While the author talks about the market linkage, strangely the discussion on the Right to Food completely misses the debate around the new governance reforms in the nature of cash transfers, food coupons and smart cards that have been introduced in recent times. It is also debatable whether the mobilisations we have seen in recent years are a spontaneous backlash from society as a whole, as Polanyi suggested. Having said that, the author succeeds well in going beyond a fragmented analysis of neoliberalism and suggesting a new vocabulary to make sense of neoliberal India. As a well-researched volume, rich in content, it offers a nuanced narrative of regulation in neoliberal India covering both macro and micro aspects.