Book Review: Anastasia Piliavsky (ed.),Patronage as Politics in South Asia

Indian elections, in many news accounts, feature the distribution of cash, liquor and other gifts to ‘buy’ voters. This has led to the classification of Indian democracy as a patronage democracy and the Indian state as a patron indulging in clientelistic activities. It has been portrayed as if ‘the parties and politicians do not convince their electors with ideological platforms. They buy votes with short-term benefits. Endemic poverty and governmental dysfunction obliterate free, reasoned and responsible judgments and drive people to exchange their votes for bureaucratic favours’ (p. 3). There is an implicit quid-pro-quo assumption in such scholarly formulations that have viewed voters and politicians as operating a system of exchange—votes being bartered for few goodies.

Piliavsky and her collaborators make a sincere effort to challenge this too simplistic notion of ‘patronage’ and ‘clientelism’ in South Asian democracies. John Dunn in a rather sarcastic tone in his foreword to the volume suggests that there is a strong tendency among scholars to rationalize every departure from the ‘systematically egalitarian western societies’. Thus, they see patronage as a residual element, a pre-modern stage of democratic development, in non-Western countries. The scholarship, in Piliavsky’s words, seems to have declared that rampant patronage and corruption in these countries represent an ominous sign of state failure. She vociferously contests this declaration and argues that rather than a site of failure, South Asia is one of the busiest laboratories of political modernity. Patronage, according to this volume, is not antithetical to democratic culture; rather, it forms the foundational basis of everyday politics in the subcontinent.

Piliavsky gathers an impressive collection of scholars to confront the paradox of democratic deepening along with pervasiveness of corrupt practices, such as prevalence of patronage and clientelism in South Asian politics. In 16 essays, the contributors to this volume, 11 anthropologists along with few historians and political scientists, use a wide range of cultural and historical perspectives to offer fresh insights into the ways in which patronage both undermines and adds vibrancy to democratic politics not just in South Asia but perhaps in other parts of the world too. Piliavsky, in her introduction, lays the groundwork by providing an insightful survey of literature, lamenting that patronage as a topic seems to have fallen off the radar among anthropologists, and discusses the limits of instrumentalist depiction of patronage politics.

The first of three sections of the book—‘The Idea of Patronage in South Asia’—contains four essays dealing with the evolution of the idea of patron–client relationship and the personalities who act as patrons, whom Mattison Mines in his essay refers to as ‘big men’. Mattison Mines and Diane Mines provide evidence from Chennai and Madurai, respectively. Seyfort Ruegg and Sumit Guha in their essays take us into deep history, with Reugg talking about patron–client relationship among medieval Tibetan monks and Guha about making up of East India Company state in western Maharashtra.

The second section, ‘Democracy as Patronage’, has seven essays that explore the emergence and persistence of patron–client relations in the field of electoral politics. While David Gilmartin’s essay largely focuses on pre-independence politics, other essays discuss much more recent phenomena. This section provides evidence from rural Rajasthan (Anastasia Piliavsky), Mumbai (Lisa Björkman), urban Gujarat (Ward Berenschot), rural Andhra Pradesh (Pamela Price with Dusi Srinivas), Lucknow district, Uttar Pradesh (Beatrice Jauregui) and rural Orissa (Steven Wilkinson).

The third section, ‘Prospects and Disappointments’, deals with South Asia as a whole. Lucia Michelutti draws upon her fascinating research from north India; Arild Engelsen Rudd talks about ‘political bullies’ or mastans in Bangladesh; Nicolas Martin’s chapter explores the dominance of landlords in Pakistan; Hildegard Diemberger dives deep into fifteenth-century Tibet; and Filippo Osella deals with the patron–client relationship among migrants and their sponsors.

Several themes stand out and perhaps this is a key to understand what Piliavsky and her collaborators are attempting to do in this volume. First, there is no uniform pattern in how patron–client relationships exist in these societies. Patrons tap multiple sources—for example, organizing feasts, donations to religious places, giving credit, using networks to access the state, usage of physical force, among many other things—to maintain their position in this relationship. Second, the clientele of these powerful patrons is not restricted to just the downtrodden or lower caste and lower class of the society. Even those who are relatively well off in the society participate as clients. Michelutti’s study of Yadavs of northern India aptly captures the dynamics of this relationship. Third, Piliavsky and her collaborators have made sincere efforts to demonstrate that existence of such intricate patronage culture did not arise in a vacuum in these countries. It has historical and cultural roots in the patronage structures of monastic orders, imperial kingdoms and patrimonial bureaucracies. Fourth, they also warn us about the darker side of this culture. These existing patronage structures at some places have perpetuated criminal activities around them. Thus, abuse and violence of clients is as much as an outcome of these structures as in some places it has led to social mobility of clients.

This is indeed a remarkable book. The introduction lays down a good overview of the chapters and the conceptual framework holds individual chapters well. Many of the essays are a treat to read. However, there are some problems. First, Piliavsky in the introduction writes that ‘In this volume we do not treat “patronage” as a term of art and we offer not definitions, we see it as a living moral idiom’ (p. 4, editor’s emphasis). This is where I feel that a reader is likely to feel unsatisfied. The contributors owe the reader at least a working definition, and at least some reference to relevant literature that locates their usage of the term.

Second, while I understand and acknowledge the scornful treatment of the rational choice paradigm by Piliavsky and some of her collaborators, I believe they have not dealt with the issue adequately. There are brilliant one-liners that have been used to make sweeping claims about how rational choice calculus does not work. Consider this statement from Piliavsky:

The electoral process is thus a mechanism of hand-to-mouth barter fuelled by the desperation of poverty and steered by self-serving choice. A billion profiteering voters wielding the abacus of rational choice is an arresting picture. But is it really like this? What happens when we move closer in? (p. 16)

There are similar instances on other pages as well (pp. 22, 28). Let me humbly submit to Piliavsky and others that rational choice theory is not as narrow as they have imagined in this volume. In the first class of a game theory course, a student is taught about the assumptions of rational choice theory and it is too demanding an expectation that these assumptions would hold every time in the real world. And soon, perhaps on the very same day, the student is introduced to the logic of backward induction, a process of reasoning backward from the end of a problem or a situation. So, if a voter does an exact opposite of an action that may have led her to some benefits, the logic of backward induction helps us in thinking about the reasons that prompted her to do what she did.

Third, this book is primarily an India book, with some sprinkling of an essay each on other South Asian countries, though Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal are still missing from the list. Moreover, the essays on other South Asian countries do not cover as varied a setting as they do on India. For example, the essays on Tibet cover the medieval period and thus their ability to offer rich insights to contemporary politics is rather limited. In the case of Bangladesh and Pakistani Punjab, the essays only feature in the section on dark side of patronage politics. I understand that one book cannot cover everything. However, the comparative cases are not helping much with the broader theoretical framework. Therefore, in my opinion, a purely India-centric volume, a no small achievement in itself, would have been more helpful in thinking about similarities and deviations in other places and not just in South Asia.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, this book should be essential reading for scholars not just of South Asia but also of democracy, patronage and elite behaviour in general. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how patronage operates in South Asian democracies and how the attempts to paint patronage only in a negative light miss the intricacies of South Asian democratic cultures. Perhaps patronage is indeed a remnant of the past in these countries, but it is changing and acquiring new meanings in modern times. It thus remains an indispensable theoretical construct.