Teaching the State in Political Theory: Notes Towards an Alternative Framework

Introduction

‘But what about the four elements?’ For the past few years that I have been teaching the introductory course on political theory at the master’s level, at least a few students have worriedly posed this question while we were on the topic of the state. While this response reflects the hold of the standard guide-book level one-true definition of the state on a typical political science student in India, it also is an indication that some of my experiments with in teaching political theory were in the required direction. Their limitations need to be acknowledged at the outset. They are limitations of my own capacities, as reflected in varying success levels, and of those imposed by an institutional structure that does not allow for much autonomy or innovation in course structures and evaluation formats as is the case with most higher education institutions in the country.

The standard definition of the state (as an institution characterized by sovereignty, population, territory and government), and of other concepts as (un)digested by students at the undergraduate level, is integral to creating an allergy towards theory, a feature one is most likely to find among students entering a postgraduate political science course, with the exception of those with undergraduate degrees from a few select universities and colleges. While the University Grants Commission (UGC) developed a master syllabus for undergraduate programmes as part of its push towards the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) in 2015, these have not been adopted outside of the central university network. ² Even as this model syllabus does retain the problems discussed in the following sections, the prior education in theory among a majority of students necessitates a curriculum design for the postgraduate courses that can both debrief and introduce the subject before venturing into any in-depth examination of the field. With the new National Education Policy (NEP) incorporating CBCS and expanding its scope to facilitate inter-university transfer of credits, it is important to address concerns about the implications of uniformity and its attendant consequences for institutional autonomy and specialization, especially in terms of regional diversity. However, the overall push towards standardization and uniformity is unavoidable given the nature of all-India examinations such as National Eligibility Test (NET) and those conducted by the Union Public Service Commission which are critical for career prospects of students. Debates on course design and pedagogy have to take into account these compulsions.

This article locates the issues that emerge with teaching the state as a concept in political theory within the overall context of debates in the discipline of political science in India. To do so, it first examines the debate over what it means to do political theory in India and highlights the disconnect between theory and other subdisciplines, on the one hand, and teaching and research on the other. This disconnect is then illustrated by discussing how the state is taught in political theory/thought courses. It then charts out a preliminary framework, encompassing three interrelated concepts, to connect the teaching of theory with other subdisciplines, particularly those studying political institutions and processes. This framework is proposed as a starting point for discussions between practitioners to bring in greater synergy within the structure of the degree programme.

The Practice of Political Theory

Political scientists in India have, in the past two decades, been engaged in a self-reflexive exercise on the state of the discipline, and these reflections are part of broader global debates in the social sciences and humanities. These critiques have problematized the construction of the domain of theory along two axes: first, political theory versus political science; and second, Western versus non-Western epistemologies. The first axis, which distinguishes normative theory from empirical theory, is a feature of the American context but remains significant in the teaching of the discipline in India even as its influence on research was always limited. ³

Normative theory is about explicating the central concepts used to elaborate the visions and values of a polity. It includes conceptual histories and principal debates over their meanings and is typically linked with the ideas of key thinkers who constitute the ‘canon’. On the other hand, empirical theory, which is concerned with explaining actual political processes, especially the functioning of the state and its institutions, eschews debates over visions and values in favour of scientific methodology to claim validity for its findings. The claims of universality by the former and scientificity by the latter have been both problematized to make a case for a dialectical relationship between theory and practice and point to the second axis.

According to this critique, the concepts and categories that constitute the tools of analysis, whether of normative or empirical theory, are assumed to be universally valid but are, in fact, based on a standard Western model and draw from the Euro-American experience of modernity. The disciplines of social sciences have themselves played a critical role in constructing the ‘West’ as well as presenting it as the evolutionary destination of the ‘rest’. In the texts on political theory and thought/philosophy, a chronological leap is effected from the ancient/classical era to that of modernity. The comparison between the ancient and modern provides the first pillar for conceptual elaboration, and the contending ideologies of the modern era form the second pillar. This renders the epistemological traditions of the non-West, also called the Global South, of little use for the tasks of both explanation and assessment of the contemporary human condition.

As a global phenomenon, modernity itself and the institutions and practices that characterize it cannot be understood from the narrow base of the Western experience. Kaviraj (2001, p. 287) argues that since political (and social) theory is a product of European cognitive self-reflection on the transformations brought about by modernity, such theory is simultaneously indispensable and inadequate to understand non-Western societies. Further, given the fusion of the modern and colonial, the Western narrative of modernity that is foundational to the social sciences remains a selective one. It is a narrative that has erased the colonial experience from its role in the construction of the modern and its theoretical framework. Quijano thus argues, through the concept of ‘coloniality of power’, that the model of power that characterizes our contemporary world can be understood only as a dyad, the modern/colonial (Quijano & Ennis, 2000).

What follows then is the need to pay attention to the specific meanings acquired by concepts of modern provenance in India (and other non-Western polities) as part of political contestations and how they shape the structure of institutions and political processes (Bhargava, 2010; Mahajan, 2013). This requires attention to the diverse traditions of thought of the non-Western societies and the socio-political arrangements they have shaped, since modern concepts interacted with these traditions and formats to produce specific political conditions and intellectual debates. Additionally, these epistemological traditions, lumped together as pre-modern, need to be investigated and explicated by themselves (beyond the point of their contact with modernity and onwards) as an act of cognitive or epistemic justice (Bhargava, 2013; Santos, 2014) as well as to bring to fore other modes of cognition and conceptions of the self, society and the world to understand and assess our world.

Thus, the tasks of both comprehension and transformation (or emancipation) require that the normative/empirical divide be transcended, the Western/non-Western divide acknowledged and corrective measures taken, to reconstitute the terrain of theory. This reconstitution is required not just in provincial terms (as in the form of an Indian political theory); they need to loop back to enable comprehension of the western experiences themselves and construct a global comparative terrain to develop and evaluate concepts, institutional structures, political strategies, policy orientations and popular mobilizations. Further, such efforts need to be clearly distinguished from the nativist push in Indian social sciences that is both insular and methodologically flawed.

We see both the call for and active work towards such reconstitution in Guru’s (2002) argument about the hierarchy between the practitioners of theory and empirics in Indian social science; in Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) theoretical exercises to understand the politics of ‘most of the world’; Banerjee et al.’s (2016) formulation on the ‘work of theory’, which Nigam (2020) has further articulated as one of ‘decolonising theory’; and in Rathore’s (2017) call for Svaraj in theory drawing from a study of lived practices and self-understandings of multiple sections of the society. Intertwined with interventions from critical, post-structural, post-colonial and decolonial studies as well as subaltern, Dalit and feminist studies, the field of research in political studies has proceeded in directions paved by these critiques.

Disjuncture Between the Field and the Classroom

These directions in the field have, however, not resulted in reconstituting the course structures in most political science programmes and hardly feature in teacher training programmes. At most, their induction has taken two forms. In the first form, they are introduced primarily through themes such as post- structuralism, post-colonialism or post-modernism, usually in the form of optional courses. Thus, the trajectory of courses as taught results in the format of ‘construct’ (by the core paper) and then ‘de-construct’, with the latter remaining optional and thereby ensuring business-as-usual. The third step of reconstruction that would change both the core and the optional papers is avoided altogether. In the second form, select research works or themes get incorporated into the existing courses in a one-off manner, thus avoiding the task of reframing. Furthermore, methodological and philosophical debates about the research process that need to be built into the teaching of postgraduate programmes are glaringly absent in the design of all these courses. This disjuncture between research and teaching/training can be attributed to the different sets of cohorts involved in the two tasks. While the case of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks produced under the National Curriculum Framework, 2005 provide an instance of successful collaboration, this has not been replicated in university systems despite the push towards standardization.

The theory allergy of students is to be pinned not only on the framing of the political theory/thought courses but also of courses on political institutions and processes, particularly in Indian politics, because they are disconnected from each other. Theory instead of being addressed throughout the degree programme as a glue that binds all the subdisciplines and the different courses together ends up as the few bitter pills to be swallowed and done away with, and that too without any discernible benefits. There is no better example than that of how the topic of the state is addressed in a regular political theory course.

Teaching the State in Indian Political Science

Here is how an average bachelor’s degree political theory course covers the state. It begins with a definition of the state, makes a distinction between the state and the government, and then moves on to theories of the origins of the state (with social contract being the primary focus) and ends with different perspectives of the state, typically limited to liberal and Marxist with an occasional addition of the Gandhian perspective. It is easy to discern why it is difficult for students to connect such a conception with that of the Indian state, its constitutional structure and governmental functioning that is part of the subsequent semesters. The CBCS model syllabus, which adheres to the framework of normative political theory and is drawn primarily from the Delhi University syllabi, does not include the state as a topic in its two foundational courses on political theory. Even the NCERT (Class XI) textbook on political theory does not have a chapter on the state. It then falls upon individual teachers to bring the state into discussions on the nature and purpose of political theory, which is what both have as their opening section. Any conversation on the state is conducted through the theme of the constitution, where again it is mainly the Indian Constitution that is taught in school and undergraduate courses. ⁴ If, on the other hand, the state is understood as a political institution rather than a concept, then courses on political theory or comparative politics do not engage with the different forms of political institutions or identify mechanisms to classify them. The limited ambit of political theory courses has meant that themes such as constitutionalism, nationalism, political parties, and social and political movements do not find a place as concepts or categories that need to be understood through a comparative and, hence, historical framework.

Courses on Indian political thought, while a standard feature in undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, bear little connection with either political theory or Indian politics courses. They continue to be organized according to individual thinkers notwithstanding the thematic turn taken by the discipline as noted by Datta and Palshikar (2013). Though beginning with the Arthashastra, and occasionally including the Manusmriti or Barani, ⁵ they deal primarily with thinkers of modern India and end with those active in the first two post-Independence decades. While the study of Indian Constituent Assembly deliberations is a critical part of Indian political theory (Bhargava, 2008), courses on Indian thought do not engage with these deliberations, despite the overlap with key figures, or with debates over federalism, regional identities, nationalism or structures of social stratification. This means that students do not get equipped with tools to locate constitutions—their making and working—as projects of elaborating and transforming the philosophy of a collective.

Thus, while general courses on political theory draw from the normative Western tradition, courses on Indian political thought and Indian politics remain delinked from them and from each other. Taken together, the courses on political theory, thought/philosophy suffer from a lack of framing and connecting devices, as a result of which their engagement with key concepts and perspectives fails to inform the study of the structure and practice of institutions as well as their mutually interdependent relationship with political processes. Furthermore, the inability of political theory to become a comparative enterprise means that the frame of reference for Indian students remains India versus the West. That is, Indian thought is not seen in relation with epistemological traditions or histories of other non-Western societies despite common-yet-diverse colonial and, later, modernization/state-building experiences. Likewise, neither Indian nor Western theory get to be located in terms of a global traffic of ideas in the long durée of history, despite this being a critical area of contemporary research in social sciences.

An Outline of a Framing Device: Authority, Community, Obligation

As a result of the churning that has taken place in the study of politics since the 1970s, the domain of the political has moved out of the limited confines of the state and the government to encompass a broader notion of power and authority and the contestations that mark struggles over meanings, resources, rights, responsibilities and values across different spheres of collective life. Alongside, there has been an expansion of the reach of the state in all areas of society with the shifts wrought by the long and continuing processes of modernity, especially those captured by the concept of governmentality. What we need then is a framework to link discussions on systems of political rule with the spaces and mechanics of the political, which are in a dynamic relationship with each other, in order to examine the forms of their interactions. In other words, the normative theory framework that shapes our theory courses, whether in a coherent or moribund form, needs to be jettisoned in favour of a framework that brings in the different components of understanding and evaluating politics.

I have sought to do this by using three, interrelated, overarching concepts as framing devices. These are Political Authority, Political Community and Political Obligation. The objective was to engage with concepts that allow for a certain level of abstraction. The challenge is to bring in abstraction that does not produce dissonance, as the current model does, but enables comprehension by allowing the explication of different historical and empirical experiences. This would further enable comparison, albeit one that consciously eschews a standard, so as to not evaluate the non-Western experience on terms set by the Western model. This would mean, for example, to not understand the Indian state and democracy as a deviance from Western liberal or social democracy.

The concept of political authority allows us to discuss the two ways in which the state is understood in the social sciences: one, as referring to any system of political rule; and two, as the specific form of the modern nation state that emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century and transformed over the subsequent centuries. What this does is prise open the abstract definition I opened this article with and highlights how the rote-learned set of four elements does not enable the comprehension of a key subject matter of the discipline. Such a conception of political authority then lets us pose questions about which institutions or persons exercise such authority (i.e., make laws and policies, discipline, wage war or collect taxes), through which processes these decisions are taken and legitimated, and the relationship between political authority and other authority structures in society that enables us to understand patterns of stability and change. Further, this allows us to show how the contemporary state is not a monolith but functions through a large number of institutions and offices, leading to contradiction and tensions between them that need to be examined and studied as a subject of research.

The modern state can also be shown as umbilically linked to the colonial state, which again greatly diverged depending on the region and century of colonization and the identity of the colonizing power. Quijano, for instance, argues that the processes of modern state formation in Europe is linked to that of the Americas (Quijano & Ennis 2000, p. 557); this requires us to revisit classic accounts like that of Held (1992) wherein the state emerges in Europe and then spreads to the rest of the world. Bringing in the colonial state while explaining the making of the modern state also allows us to show how both exhibit mixtures of sovereignty and governmentality, but these two features acquire different valence in the two contexts. The concept also allows us to explore the forms of pre-modern states in India (more accurately understood as South Asia), refer to debates over whether there are uniquely Indian features that can be seen in these state forms and explore the continued impact of these forms in the extant life of the nation state, especially in terms of regional diversities (Das, 2013; Kaviraj, 2010a, 2010b). It paves the way to, at the very least, allude to such debates in other non-Western societies, even though much work is needed for such a reading list to be put together even in the case of India.

The idea of a political community again allows us to explore the relationships that bind those who come under a common political system. In other words, we can pose the twofold problem: What makes a community political and what does a community consider political and explore the same through the different examples from recent and older historical experience. In India, there are diverging perspectives on whether the political domain constituted an autonomous one prior to the institution of the colonial state or whether the social or religious domain, instead of the political, provided coherence to the community rendering the state marginal to the life of the community (Das, 2013; Kaviraj, 2010b). The criteria of membership, and whether it takes the form of citizenship or subjecthood, show how these bounded identities are themselves constituted through political activity. In other words, as Laclau pointed out, politics can be understood as an activity that seeks to inscribe a specific meaning to the universal (Laclau, 1992). Such debates on membership criteria also help locate processes that seek to erase the gap between the composition of the political community and the privileged identity setting up what Hannah Arendt (1973, p. 230) refers to as the tension between the state and the nation.

The third concept of political obligation allows us to engage with the grounds on which a political authority seeks legitimacy, as well as how these claims to acceptance are evaluated and acted upon by the political community. While the concept of obligation is primarily associated with the concept of social contract located in the European context of early modernity, it lends itself to abstraction such that it can be shown to be an ongoing exercise in all polities, especially when we take into account their contemporary democratic form. In other words, the idea of political obligation enables a key task of the discipline, that is, of examining and evaluating the working of democracies. It allows us to engage with classificatory pairs like that of procedural versus substantive democracies, and contrast electoral majorities with a normative state bound by rule of law.

It also allows us to explore the ethical issues involved in situations where obedience is demanded without corresponding rights, for example, emergency provisions or extraordinary laws, as well as discern the dynamics of obligation involved in situations of democratic decline and when regimes acquire authoritarian and totalitarian forms. The ambit of obligation allows a useful segue to the values that a polity seeks to pursue and mechanisms through which they are pursued, dealing with ideas of rights, freedoms, equality and justice. These constitute the building blocks of a conventional political theory course and feature as critical segments of both the institutional structure of the Indian state and the working of Indian democracy.

Taken together, the three framing concepts also link to the international context and allow us to pose questions such as whether a global political authority can be discerned in the contemporary era dominated by the rule of capital, whether there is a case to be made for a global political community and whether—taking a cue from developments in environmental theory—other non-human species and the earth itself can be understood as members of a planetary community and explore the corresponding obligations this would impose on both states and human communities.

To conclude, this article argues that the challenges of teaching the Indian state are linked to the format in which the domain of political theory is taught and in the process it is confined to. Through this outline of three interrelated framing concepts, a case is made for reconstructing the course structure of political theory in Indian institutions to bring the teaching of theory in consonance with the developments in the field and build capacities for research on Indian politics that is unsurprisingly the principal area of research in our institutions. This is but a preliminary outline, requiring sustained conversations within the discipline as well as dialogue with related disciplines, particularly those of history, sociology and philosophy. Such a dialogue goes beyond the fashionable vocabulary of interdisciplinarity. It requires us to read across the available research and workshop these ideas and work towards assembling reading lists and, most importantly, produce textbooks including in all Indian languages so as to reach the large number of students enrolling in political science every year.