‘Persistent Centrism’ and Its Explanations

In the 1960s, C.H. Morris-Jones (1963) declared that nothing in India was what it seemed to be. As a result, a student of political institutions would be baffled by the difference in the formal rendering of the styles of functioning of government systems in India, and the inside story of how they actually worked. Looking for categories, which were operative within the Indian context and were more appropriate for understanding political reality in India, he wrote of three political idioms—modern, traditional and saintly—which, he concluded, captured the distinctive ways in which political power was exercised in India. Around the time that Morris-Jones was grappling with the predicament over appropriate categories, guided by an unmitigated quest for a future, however distant, for a ‘modern’ Indian democracy, Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph were on a field visit to India to study the second general elections in a country where the exercise of franchise and participation in the electoral process was not as yet a ‘familiar’ experience. Equipped with tools of survey drawn from a context where methodological individualism is assumed to be the basis of formation of political opinion, soon enough the Rudolphs realized, and stressed emphatically in an article published subsequently, that modes of enquiry, which were developed in a particular context, could not be transferred elsewhere on an assumption of universal applicability. Indeed, to the Rudolphs, the tools developed in the ‘familiar’ contexts of American politics not only appeared ‘strange’ in the Indian context but also came across as inadequate and ineffective in making intelligible the evolving contours of electoral democracy in India. Not surprisingly, therefore, they stressed the need for devising conceptual tools which were not simply efficient but also ‘intelligible’, an attribute which did not refer to their applicability in the same form across cultures, but to their mobility and capacity to assume legible forms as they travelled.

Several years later, in 2005, in an article critiquing the ‘imperialism of categories’, the Rudolphs revisited their article on ‘Surveys in India’, written after their field visit in the 1950s, reiterating their interest in enhancing the portability and pertinence of analytical categories. While the concern around making categories malleable and mobile continued to be clearly stated, by 2005 this concern came to be articulated not simply as a critique of the determinism dictated by the modernization paradigm, but in conversation with other critiques of the dominant social science paradigms—primarily issues of cultural violence associated with the imposition of alien categories, and the modes of power that are imbricated in the production of knowledge about the other. For the Rudolphs, ‘situated knowledge’, which could be realized through area studies, was consonant with their critique of structural-functionalism and modernization theory and their quest for epistemic pluralism and comparative generalization. Self-reflexivity and critical relationship with their field, and the American Political Science academia on the other hand, is manifest throughout their writings, particularly in the way they envisaged area studies of ‘a different kind’. Distancing themselves from the rationality of bureaucratic functioning which characterized the development of area studies in the United States, which began as a vehicle for ‘stockpiling area experts’, the Rudolphs saw themselves as doing area studies as a counter-movement against universalisms which are ‘indifferent to difference’. But they were equally contemptuous of certain simplistic post-colonial critiques, which collapse all area studies into a ‘power-shapes knowledge paradigm’ characteristic of Orientalism (Rudolph & Rudolph, 2008, pp. 110–117).

Calling for a ‘more political anthropology’, the Rudolphs crafted an enduring relationship with their field (i.e., India) producing a corpus of writings in which they identified particular problems to delve deep for thick analysis and subsequently craft conceptual categories and frameworks that could capture specificities and simultaneously pave the way towards effective generalization. In their path-breaking work In Pursuit of Lakshmi (1987, henceforth referred to as Lakshmi), for example, the Rudolphs identified three themes and tendencies around which their study of the Indian state and politics could be organized: state formation and the contest over ‘stateness’, drawing from this, the institutional space of democracy which included constitutional design and institutional change and lastly, democracy and the public sphere, including the social and cultural components which formed the contexts within which the institutional space of democracy assumed form and substance.

Exploring these tendencies in Lakshmi, the Rudolphs proposed that the Indian state and political process could be comprehended through analytical categories ‘adapted’ to capture its particularity. Prominent among these was ‘a persistent centrism’, which they found to be the ‘most striking feature’ of Indian politics (Lakshmi, 1987, p. 19). The Indian National Congress was crucial to this arrival at ‘centrism’ in Indian politics. Not only did it provide an ‘apex organization’ encompassing diverse regional and political formations, in the process it also crafted a politics that sought to balance and alleviate any potential conflict among such formations, through a centrist politics made manifest in secularism, socialism and democracy. The contexts in which a centrist politics took form and endured were, as the Rudolphs saw it, the ‘marginality of class politics’, the absence of enduring cleavages and national confessional parties based on religion, the electoral strength of disadvantaged confessional and social minorities and the increasing political consciousness and effectiveness of ‘bullock capitalists’. In other words, if students of Indian politics were looking for answers to the question why India was able to put together a polity in which major social cleavages and contradictions were not able to express themselves in irreconcilable political conflicts and formations, they could rely on the explanations offered by the Rudolphs. Yet, at another level, the explanations appear to be, as has been pointed out in some quarters, driven by the imperatives of another dominant framework in comparative studies, which looks for the ways in which political systems hold together. Such an approach will necessarily focus not only on the state and its institutions but also on social groupings, political parties, interest groups, social movements, etc., but primarily for the purpose of seeing their usefulness in explaining political processes, for example, political socialization, patterns of political culture, techniques of interest articulation and interest aggregation, styles of political recruitment, extent of political efficacy and political apathy, ruling elites, etc. One could then argue that despite the Rudolphs’ wariness of building path-dependent and universal explanatory frameworks, they could not break free from thinking of Indian politics as a political system in which the propulsion towards a centrist equilibrium could be traced by focusing only on those forces and tendencies, which pointed towards such an outcome.

It is not surprising that the formulations by the Rudolphs in Lakshmi attracted the critical attention of other scholars contemporaneous with them. Rajni Kothari, in particular, who in his review of the ‘Rudolph thesis’, described the duo as ‘India specialists’, who ‘operating from the resourceful base of Chicago University’s multi-disciplinary community of India watchers’, visited India regularly ‘to stay in touch’. Yet Kothari’s critique of the ‘Rudolph thesis’, despite the ascription to their alien location, with which he begins, was based on more substantial premises. The description of the Indian state by the Rudolphs as ‘centrist multi-class, equilibrium seeking’, says Kothari, was a conclusion which drew from the duos location in the ‘American Comparative tradition of systems research and institutional analysis seeking sources of stability and order within institutional framework, and of erosion of the same when it occurs’. Not only does the quest for equilibrating systems lead to the conclusion that the Indian state was centrist, with the Indian National Congress as the equilibrating agent, but it also compels the analysis to be a view from the vantage point of the ‘apex’ rather than the margins. As a result, the ‘apex view’ occluded and ignored the transformations that take place in the ‘vast social peripheries’ (Kothari, 1988, pp. 274–275). Such an approach, if one were to concede to the critique by Kothari, will present a view of Indian politics as one in which its multifarious complexities are viewed primarily as conflicts within the institutional space of democracy, in which the political system, as a web of interactions among different contributory components, strives for an equilibrium.

The Rudolphs would have been similarly inclined to see that part of Kothari’s critique which charged them of adopting an approach which sees sociopolitical realities as part of an interacting and balance-seeking system, as having emerged from his own predilection of being a participant in bringing about the ‘behavioural turn’ in Indian Political Science and in constructing a ‘bridge’ between Indian and American Political Science. The Rudolphs attributed the behavioural turn in Indian Political Science and social sciences in general in the 1950s and 1960s to ‘the desire to shed the colonial legacy’ with its thrust on institutional and legal studies, and the impetus which was given to scientific thinking in intellectual life under the influence of Nehru, as an ‘antidote to religion’ (Rudolph & Rudolph, 2013, pp. 1–5). Irrespective of the contention over categories and approaches on both sides, the Rudolphs and Kothari presented influential frameworks for understanding the state and politics in India by presenting compelling explanations which looked for complexities beyond the instrumental understanding of the state as merely an alienated ensemble of institutions. In the 1980s in particular, before and after the onset of what is construed as the neoliberal turn in the Indian state, a cluster of writings on the Indian state (Bardhan, 1984; Chatterjee, 2004; Kaviraj, 1989; Vanaik, 1990), similarly seized with the problem of understanding the Indian state and politics, focused on the class character of the post-colonial/developmental state, and the different class-coalitions, through which the state managed and functioned amidst certain constraints, with relative autonomy. The organization of political power and order in independent India, they argued, in the absence of a dominant/revolutionary bourgeoisie, was not based on a rupture from the colonial order, but was marked by a statist phase in which the bourgeoisie accepted pre-capitalist classes as subsidiary allies, while taking up the unified course of development of capital.

In the 1980s, however, the Rudolphs were asking two important questions, both of which had to do with the social basis of the state in terms of class and religion, to look for answers to the following two puzzles:

why in a country with significant class differences in its industrial and agricultural sector are India’s national parties centrist and pluralist rather than left or right parties? Why, in a country with a confessional majority (Hindu) and prominent religious minorities, have there been no enduring national cleavages and no national confessional parties based on religion as there are in the Middle East or Western Europe? (Rudolph & Rudolph, 1987, p. 19)

The Rudolphs found the answers in the processes of state formation, the institutional space of democracy and the contests that take place therein, and the ways by which the political regimes resolve the conflicts, within the contours of a constitutional democracy. The vicissitudes of Indian politics and democracy are explained not in terms of class-contradictions and state autonomy but in terms of group interests which press ‘demands’, and state functions which are in the form of ‘commands’. In different periods in time, the relative dominance of ‘demand politics’ and alternatively ‘command politics’ has corresponded to the strengthening or weakening of democracy (through ‘de-institutionalization’ or erosion of institutions). Yet, the state is largely one, which resolves conflicts by mitigating the angularity of classes—industrial or agricultural—helped by the middle peasantry, the ‘bullock capitalists’ as a ‘rural cushion’ and by ensuring that in the state of equilibrium that ensues, all stand to benefit. In the concluding pages of Lakshmi, the Rudolphs affirm:

Like Hindu conceptions of the divine, the state in India is polymorphous, a creature of manifold forms and orientations. One is the third actor whose scale and power contribute to the marginality of class politics. Another is a liberal or citizens’ state, a juridical body whose legislative reach is limited by a written constitution, judicial review and fundamental rights. Still another is a capitalist state that guards the boundaries of the mixed economy by protecting the rights and promoting the interests of property in agriculture, commerce and industry. Finally, a socialist state is concerned to use public power to eradicate poverty and privilege and tame private power. Which combination prevails in a particular historical setting is a matter for inquiry. (1987, pp. 400–401)

The homeostasis of the polymorphous state evidently undergoes a change with the changes in the formation of political power following the structural reforms in the Indian economy in the late 1980s and beyond. Later writings by the Rudolphs address some of the salient contests that emerge in the domain of the state, particularly in the context of the diminished ‘interventionist state’. Interestingly, while grappling with the new configurations of political power, the Rudolphs continue to concern themselves with the institutional matrix of the state, and the manner in which the stability of the constitutional design is retained, when the Indian state is no longer interventionist, but regulatory in character. Earlier in Lakshmi, the Rudolphs had problematized the relationship between the Judiciary and the Parliament as an aspect of the ‘struggle over stateness’—‘the institutional rivalry’ between the two manifesting the contestations which inhere in state power, and the functional differentiation among different parts of the government. If ‘state issues’ in the 1980s were largely about institutional rivalry, with the outcome (it would appear) of aggregation of state power, by the 1990s, the move towards ‘market competition festered by the regulatory state’ saw a corresponding shift that was experienced in the ‘conduct of politics’. The political field changed, becoming decentralized and heterogeneous, with implications for the arrangement and distribution of political power. In a 2001 publication, the Rudolphs argue that with the ‘displacement’ of a dominant party system by a multiparty system and regional parties, and ‘the federal states gaining ground at the expense of the centre’, the balance of power shifted to favour the Supreme Court, the Election Commission and the President ‘at the expense of the Parliament, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet’. Indeed, the Rudolphs explain the new ‘regulatory roles’ of existing institution as providing stability to the system through a ‘renegotiation of balance of power’. This involved filling in the political space by playing their ‘constitutional roles as the regulatory mechanisms of democratic politics’, but in ways which are more ‘procedural than substantive’, ensuring procedural fairness in the ‘operation of a multiparty system and the formation and conduct of coalition governments in a federal framework’ (Rudolph & Rudolph, 2001, pp. 129–130). Significantly, from their essay on judicial review versus parliamentary sovereignty in 1987 to the 2001 essay on constitutional reform in the context of emergence of a regulatory state, we see the Rudolphs offering an account of the overlapping, non-centralized forms of political authority produced through a mutual and synchronic imbrication of the traditional with the modern. And yet, at some points, the discussion on institutional design and change seems to veer back towards familiar Western/North American frameworks jettisoned in the earlier discussion on modes of enquiry. For example,the article on judicial review versus parliamentary sovereignty ends by contemplating whether the pursuit of institutional self-interest prescribed by Federalists in the USA as a successful tool to regulate the division of powers within government in the American context could successfully unfold in India (p. 210). Similarly, the 1987 essay in Lakshmi, ‘Demand Groups and Pluralist Representations in India’, takes recourse to ‘interest-group pluralism’, previously debunked by the authors as an ‘explanatory social science concept vitiated by the anomalies and contradictions’ arising out of its application in industrial democracies (p. 243), to now examine (state-dominated) Indian variants of pluralism.

Indeed, the shift from the struggle over state power to negotiated balance of power opens up the possibility of reviewing the idea of the ‘polymorphous state’ presented by the Rudolphs in the 1980s, in all its manifestations—the third actor contributing to the marginality of class politics, a liberal or citizens’ state, a capitalist state guarding the boundaries of the mixed economy by protecting the rights and promoting the interests of property in agriculture, commerce and industry, and a socialist state which uses public power to eradicate poverty and privilege and tame private power. In addition, rather than the ‘centrist state’, it is the de-centred political regime which has now assumed power to represent the dominant corporate class and the religious majority. The puzzle that the Rudolphs started with in Lakshmi comes to haunt us in a new form, since it is the dominant cleavages which have converged and accumulated to constitute a de-centred state. It would be interesting to inquire into the changing contours of the institutional space of democracy in a context where a dominant party establishes an encompassing system of political power. It will be interesting also to revisit Kothari’s critique of the Rudolph thesis to see whether the upsurges (and simply ‘interest group’ ‘mobilizations’) based on class, ethnicity, ecology, gender and nationality may be understood as politics of transformation and struggle in the earlier centrist paradigm and the contemporary dominant de-centred state paradigm. In this context, the earlier summoning of the category ‘demand groups’ to characterize student mobilizations, as neither consumers, workers nor producers, is compelled by the reticence to see ‘mobilizations’ as ‘movements’ which are not merely an aggregate of interests but ‘people’ galvanized into critiquing and transforming (and not negotiating) the existing structures of power.