Book Review: Achin Vanaik,ed.,ICSSR Research Surveys and Explorations: Political Science

After a long hiatus, the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) under the chairmanship of Javeed Alam has put together these volumes covering a wide range of important themes in the discipline. The individual editors and authors of these volumes have to be commended for not only providing a very comprehensive review of the literature written over the past several decades in each of these sub-themes, but also furthering the debates within them thereby making important interventions in the field. In other words, the authors have taken their mandate of ‘explorations’ quite seriously and have gone beyond merely undertaking ‘surveys’. They have also pointed to gaps and possibilities of further research in the individual areas discussed. This is the strength of these books, rendering them useful to both political science researchers/scholars and teachers who can use them in their classrooms. Even a lay person unfamiliar with, but curious about, political science can pick up one of these volumes and get a good sense of what has been written so far and the major debates taking place in that particular area of study (such as international relations). Written lucidly, they also offer an impressive set of bibliographies for each topic covered. In this review I will not be able to do justice to each chapter in these volumes. Rather, I will address larger thematic concerns within which these books are placed and then assess the volumes accordingly as to whether they fulfil the expectations and the mandate set out for them. In doing so, I will highlight some chapters and sections over others.

The series begins with an excellent and very insightful introduction (repeated at the beginning of each volume) by Achin Vanaik, who identifies some of the major debates in the discipline over the past several decades. The big themes he examines at the outset are: the need to examine the nature of the Indian state in light of changes in the global political economy; whether Indian democracy is deepening or thinning; the gap between procedural and substantive dimensions of democracy in India; the rise of identity based struggles; the nature of Indian modernity and the relationship between what is going on domestically to the international. According to him, in investigating these larger concerns what is connecting all four volumes is a deep dissatisfaction with Western concepts and interpretive frameworks in dealing with Indian political realities. This, he points out, has led to a search for ways in which these categories and concepts can be either ‘Indianized’ and thereby used in more creative ways, or jettisoned altogether in favour of conceptual innovation. In his view, concepts which have been significantly reformulated to suit Indian circumstances are secularism, communitarianism, civil and political society and, critical traditionalism amongst others. He points out that it is this search for ‘Indian distinctiveness’ which is the common current that runs through all four volumes.

Overall, the books do effectively address what Vanaik identifies as the major fault lines within the discipline along with a search for ‘Indian distinctiveness’. In the first volume on the Indian state, the editor Samir K. Das and individual authors explore major contradictions between a post-liberalization state and one which is also under pressure from various sections of society including the marginalized. Supriya Roy Chodhury, while reviewing the literature on political economy and the Indian state, rightly argues that the state is riveted by tensions between greater marketization and expanding reservations and these contradictions have not been theorized enough. Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, while looking at social policy rejects, the argument that the state is retreating; rather, he points out, it is ‘actively intervening in the economy to “naturalize” neo-liberalism’ (v. 1, p. 114). A discussion of some of these tensions is carried forward onto the next volume which focuses on how this has impacted Indian democracy. Neera Chandhoke’s chapters raise important questions about the gap between formal versus substantive democracy while all the other authors look at formal institutions and political processes (constitution, federal structures, electoral patterns and political parties) to address the extent of democratization in India and its distinctiveness. The editor, K. C. Suri, in his introduction, makes a strong and convincing plea for the uniqueness of the Indian context, arguing that despite all its problems democracy has survived. He argues that its ideals are intact even if it does not always translate into democratic realities on the ground thereby defying naysayers all over the world especially in the West who have generally approached democracy through a Western model and not taken Indian democracy seriously enough (potentially as a universal model).

The manner in which some of these ideas and processes may have translated into the world of theory or have been influenced by them forms the basis of the next volume. The editors begin with a thought-provoking discussion on how to understand the ‘Indian’, the ‘political’ and ‘thought’ in fashioning a body of work called ‘Indian political thought’ (IPT). The project of recovering an authentic ‘Indian’ thought outside the Western they argue is not possible given the emergence of this scholarship as an outcome of colonialism but they suggest that the ‘Indian’ in IPT needs to remain open-ended so that one can ‘explore the past in terms of the limits and possibilities of its own conceptions without necessarily denying its connections with what constitutes its starting point, that is, the substantive reality of India today’ (v. 3, p. 14). They further argue that the notion of the ‘political’ has greatly expanded (as not so separate from the social) which has to be taken into account and the emphasis on the term ‘thought’ over ‘theory’ in IPT suggests the distinctiveness of looking at political theory and ideas in the Indian context. According to them, ‘the thought’ in IPT is rooted in practice, ethical engagement and is fundamentally inter-disciplinary. The individual authors, in what can be considered the strongest volume in the series in terms of breaking new ground, push conceptual boundaries by moving away from focusing on individual thinkers to looking in interesting ways at themes such as temporality, nationalism, how the political was discussed in ancient and medieval times, cosmopolitanism and, the relationship between ethics and politics. In the only chapter in the series that explicitly deals with Dalit, feminist and Adivasi discourses, Krishna Swamy Dara forcefully argues that there is an urgent need to interrogate political theories and practices as well as institutional structures from these perspectives.

The last and rather lengthy volume of the series (running into 543 pages) makes a refreshing attempt to move away from state–centric approaches and question what the volume editor Navneeta Chadha-Behera calls ‘inside-outside binaries’. A. K. Ramakrishnan, in an engaging discussion, focuses on the usually neglected dimension of ‘normative’ aspects of India’s foreign policy such as the policy of non-alignment, support of democracy and so on. Matthew Joseph C. insightfully examines the intersection between the domestic and global by looking at the relationship between Indian civil society and the ‘international’. But there is some dissonance between what can be read as an ambitious introduction in terms of what it wants to achieve conceptually and what the book actually ends up doing. For instance discussions on India’s engagement with other countries or its international policies still assume India as a unified coherent actor without adequately interrogating how the inside-outside are co-constituted.

Despite the general editor’s plea in his introduction that the reader appreciate what has been covered and not focus on what has been left out, as a reviewer I must point out some gaps which, had they been filled, would have made the books and series even richer and more exhaustive. In the volumes on state and democracy too little attention has been paid to significant themes such as gender, caste and religion. When notions of the political have expanded considerably, attention to mere formal political processes and institutions (such as in the volume on democracy) does not appear adequate. The call for moving beyond Western paradigms must also include moving beyond the conventional manner (such as in Western modernization theories) with which politics has been viewed. The importance of informal processes including those such as popular culture and culture in general have all been critical in thinking about how the role of the state and notions of democracy are being shaped. Alongside the discussions on formal political institutions, chapters on popular culture and media, on feminist expressions of democracy and on caste could have been included in the democracy volume, and religion and its political expressions could have been addressed in the volume on the state. Even the volume on IPT makes no mention of the vociferous debates on secularism that has dominated political theorizing in India over the past two decades (although it does include a chapter on caste and gender). Given the importance of religion in Indian society and politics it does seem to be an obvious missing piece in the series. Having said that, all four volumes are important contributions to the field of political science and do represent what the general editor calls the ‘state of the art’ in the discipline. The volumes cover the gamut of some of the most important political debates taking place and have effectively attempted to place these discussions within the specificity of the Indian context. They are, therefore, a must read for all those interested in a greater understanding of Indian politics today.