Book Review: Himanshu Roy,Mahendra Prasad Singh and A. P. S. Chauhan (eds.),State Politics in India

The efforts of the three editors and many contributors to provide an account, in this book, of the politics of 27 of the 29 states of India and the two principal union territories (Delhi and Puducherry) is heroic and, I believe, without precedent. (Only Himachal Pradesh is missing, and the preparation of the book evidently preceded the formation of Telangana.) The effort is certainly important given, on the one hand, the increased importance of the arena of state politics in India over the last three decades, when ‘multi-party pluralism and regionalism … have enhanced the role and autonomy of state governments’ (p. 12), and on the other, the fact that ‘the study of state politics [has] remained a rather under-cultivated field of enquiry’ (p. 1). What is especially to be welcomed in the book are the generally careful and richly informative studies of the states of the Northeast, which have rarely, if ever, been included in the comparative studies of Indian states. Reading together, these chapters provide a fine analysis of the political sociology of the region.

The Introduction to the book, by Mahendra Prasad Singh, discusses the principal arguments of the significant earlier attempts by different authors to compare the politics of Indian states, starting with the collection edited by Myron Weiner, published in 1968, and concluding with the typology proposed by Atul Kohli in Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India, of 2012. None of these books or articles is as ambitious as the volume under review, in terms of coverage. Singh, in the Introduction, then sets out a framework—worked out by the authors at two preparatory conferences—which, it seems, the different contributors were asked to refer to in their accounts. The aim is that of explaining the state-level variations in the five processes that are held to characterize politics in India in general— democratization, multicultural secularization, federalization, economic liberalization and sustainable development. These five factors are then held to be explanatory variables: geography and history; demography, culture and social capital; political economy ‘with foci on macro-economic sectors and class structure’; patterns of state party systems and social and political movements; and the quality of political leadership. Singh concludes, however, that ‘the crucial problematique’ is that of ‘state capability’, or ‘the ability of government to achieve the objectives that it sets for itself’ (p. 26). Whether state capability is explicans or explicandum is not entirely clear. But it does not matter much for the book, since the authors of the various individual studies rarely make reference to it.

The different chapters are of varying length, from a mere 16 pages on Maharashtra to more than 50 on West Bengal, and they vary considerably both in terms of the extent to which the different authors have sought to discuss the existing literature on the state in question and how far the analysis offered has been brought up to date. The reader forms the impression that the texts must have been completed several years ago, and that they have been hastily updated, if at all. The account given of the politics of Tamil Nadu, for instance, makes no reference to the substantial work of Andrew Wyatt on political parties, nor to the classic studies of the Dravidian movement by Marguerite Ross Barnett and by Rajadurai and Geetha, and it seems to end around 2004. The framework set out by M. P. Singh invites a broad and a descriptive account of the context of the politics of each of the states. And then, in practice, if not according to the intentions of the project, different authors have generally focused on providing an analysis of the history of the electoral/party politics. The extent to which there is discussion on ‘secularization, federalization, economic liberalization and sustainable development’ varies a good deal from chapter to chapter, and sometimes these themes appear hardly at all. The collection lacks a strong comparative focus. Singh writes of the studies contained in the book, edited by Myron Weiner that, ‘No overarching, systematic explanatory framework emerged [from them]’ (p. 3). The same might well be said of this collection, and it is not at all surprising that the short conclusion is quite vacuous.

By comparison, several of the earlier studies of state politics had a strong comparative focus. Frankel and Rao, in the studies that they brought together in two volumes published in 1989 and 1990, were concerned with the extent and implications of ‘the decline of dominance’. Atul Kohli, in work carried on over more than three decades, and the present author, in several studies, have been interested in the implications of differences in state politics for economic development and distribution. Scholars in the book, edited by Rob Jenkins were interested to analyse the variations across states in relation to several themes, including differences in responses to economic liberalization.

The comparative focus of these studies, and others, is both their strength, and perhaps in some sense a weakness, as well, since they do not necessarily provide a through-going history of the politics of the states with which they deal. It is here, that the book under review makes its contribution, for the best of the individual studies do provide a historical account of the development of the politics of the state or territory with which they are concerned, generally focusing on the story of the rise and fall of different political parties, and offering some analysis of the social and economic context, with comment on specific ‘local’ themes (such as the Telangana movement in the chapter on the old Andhra Pradesh, deindustrialization in Bihar or social movements in Karnataka). In sum, the collection is more or less useful, depending on which case the reader is interested in, but it falls far short of being the authoritative volume that the editors aimed at.