Book review: Subrata K. Mitra,Governance by Stealth: The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Making of the Indian State

How to govern effectively has been a persistent concern for philosophers, scholars, activists and policymakers. Accordingly, there have been various conceptions of governance and the state has been at the centre of such theorizations. There have been many studies on the nature of the state in the Indian context: its structure, components and processes. Comparatively, there is lesser work on the ministries of the state, especially the key ones such as the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). This is to be expected, given the obvious methodological problems of accessing archives, documents and other sources concerning these institutions.

It is in this context that Subrata K. Mitra’s book is a new and important contribution to examining governance through the omnipresent institution of the Indian state—the MHA, which Mitra characterizes (citing Peter Hennessy) as the ‘charlady’ of the government. Mitra’s interest in examining, what he refers to as ‘Home’ throughout, seems to stem from the transition of the colonial Home Department to the postcolonial MHA. The ‘Home’, Mitra argues, played a crucial role in facilitating a relatively smooth and less violent transition of a colony into a ‘noisy but effective’ postcolonial democracy. Mitra’s central argument is that ‘Home’ uses ‘minimum force to generate maximum order’ and that constitutes ‘governance by stealth’.

The postcolonial transition has been studied extensively. The significant contribution of this book is in examining this question from the perspective of the MHA and providing a detailed account of the processes and deliberations required to hold the society together in troubled times. Through archival sources, memoirs, annual reports and interviews with ministry officials, the book enables the reader to understand how the bureaucracy and the political establishment work in tandem (and what happens when they do not); how the language of politics shifts away from rights and demands to norms, laws and often force when one shifts the perspective to ‘politics within the system’. The book covers an immense range of issues, including the Emergency (of 1975–76); the anti-Sikh riots (of 1984); the status of Jammu and Kashmir and the Maoist movements. This scope enables the author to demonstrate how the MHA provides continuity beneath a tumultuous political surface. This is particularly evident in the discussion of its role in the national language policy debates and in sections that deal with the failure of elite consensus, leading to the Home being bereft of clear instructions to prevent the Babri Masjid demolition. These sections are well argued. It is particularly interesting to read about what Mitra terms as ‘elite consensus between the triad of the Prime Minister, Home Minister and the Home Secretary’, in the operation of the MHA. Mitra effectively demonstrates—through extensive example of the deliberations between Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel for instance—the careful balance that these three offices have had to strike between political demands and adherence to norms.

The book opens new questions for other researchers and the inclusion of archival excerpts as appendices may also facilitate further research. A more robust methodological section about the nature of these archives and the processes of accessing and analysing them would have been a good addition. The theoretical framework of the book derives from two sets of ideas—‘institutionalism’ and the Foucauldian idea of governance by exercising ‘economy of power’. It is through a combination of the two that we arrive at ‘governance by stealth’, that is, ‘finding ways and means to minimize resistance to public authority’. The idea that ‘stealth’ is often employed in democracy, government and advocacy has been discussed in discussion since the early years of the 2000s in writings on stealth democracy in the American political system (John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse) and in evaluating the role of the European Union in accommodating economic policies through ‘integration by stealth’ (Giandomenico Majone). In the Indian context, ‘reforms by stealth’ (Rob Jenkins, Medha M. Kudaisya) has been discussed to some extent. Mitra’s work adds to this literature by adding another dimension to our understanding of how ‘stealth’ is employed by the state. Since deliberations within MHA lie outside of public eye, it is, Mitra argues, a more effective way of governance. To describe what the MHA does entirely as ‘stealth’ is not convincing, given the evidence in the book. At several places, Mitra shows how the MHA is influenced by the deliberative and participative processes of not just democracy but also of the larger institutional framework that MHA is a part of. Stealth then could be a part of MHA’s strategy but not the whole, and some more analysis of the heterogenous nature of the ministry’s operation would have made the argument nuanced.

A few critical points need to be mentioned here. First, the book raises a conceptual doubt on the nature of the state. At different points in the narrative, the author argues that MHA is the intermediary between the state and the society (p. 9), and in other places, describes ‘Home’ as the agent of state but also its maker (p. 373). This ambiguity about the nature of MHA—whether it is a part of the state or not—leads to a question about the nature of the state itself. While it is well understood that the MHA has had a crucial role in the formation of the Indian state, yet, what are the implications of thinking about the ministry as separate from the state in the form of an intermediary? Second, the argument of the book is split across two axes—how the MHA has made successful transitions in complex political scenarios and how it used governance by stealth as a method to achieve this. While the former is well spelt out, it is the mapping of stealth onto the MHA’s working that seems less convincing, precisely because everything that the MHA does is subsumed under the umbrella of stealth, making the category a little rarefied. For instance, the author argues that the ‘shaping of young ICS officers by their seniors’, in the transition from colonial service to an independent bureaucracy, ‘was a crucial parameter of governance by stealth’ (p. 131). Arguments such as these are not convincing, in part because they simplify multifarious institutional arrangements into a catch-all concept. Third, some significant arguments are unsubstantiated by evidence. The author argues that the colonial home department borrowed the idea of stealth from the Indian conception of upayas—sam, dana, danda, bheda (p. 53). These are significant claims that could have been substantiated more carefully. Overall, the book presents a formidable descriptive history of the role of MHA in the sustenance of the Indian nation-state. The reader will gain significantly by getting a broad-stroke view of the functioning of both, the MHA and the Indian state. The author could have taken into account critical perspectives on India’s institutional history, instead of adopting a linear, celebratory approach of a chequered but ultimately successful trajectory of the MHA.