Abstract
In the passing away of Alfred C. Stepan, a member of the advisory board of Studies in Indian Politics, we have lost a scholar of comparative politics who would always alert us to the weakness of arguments about Indian exceptionalism. During his long and distinguished career of teaching and research, he held positions at various universities including Yale, Oxford, Columbia and the Central European University.
Al Stepan’s rich corpus of work on a diverse array of subjects such as the role of the military in politics, democratic transition and consolidation, federalism and nation building as well as religion, politics and democracy draws greatly from his own experiences from across the world. In his interview to Munck and Snyder (2007, pp. 392–455), he tells us that his experience as a journalist with The Economist as well as his participation in the Marine Corps sharpened his research acumen and skills.
Though he wrote about India only during the latter phase of his career, India was among the six countries that interested him ‘politically and aesthetically’ (ibid. 397). India was for Stepan an exemplar for a central idea in his work: in countries with deep diversity, state-building was more appropriate than nation-building and the territorial boundaries of state did not have to coincide with the cultural boundaries of a nation.
In his book Crafting State-Nations: India and other Multinational Democracies (Stepan et al. 2011) co-authored with Juan Linz and Yogendra Yadav, they ask how countries with deep diversity managed to reconcile democracy with diversity. Their study underlined the importance of state-nations whose success was based on their ability to constantly adapt to the demands of diversity.
His engagement with India also gave him a chance to look more closely at the literature on federalism. In an influential article, ‘Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model’ (Stepan, 1999) he demonstrated that besides the American ‘coming-together’ model, the ‘holding-together’ and ‘putting-together’ models of federalism offered alternative possibilities.
The Indian experience among others also contributed to his thesis on ‘twin tolerations’ (Stepan, 2000). This thesis moves away from the Western model of secularism and posits a ‘religiously friendly’ model of religion-state-society relations which not only creates greater space for interfaith accommodation but is also more demos-enabling.
Stepan’s studies moved India from an outlier in comparative politics to an integral case for making sense of the practice of democracy in the contemporary world. Al Stepan will be greatly missed.