Abstract
As democratic ideals diffused in the Himalayan territories, they acquired a unique shape such that it made imperative the empirical study of democracy. The book under review is a collaboration of different perspectives on the existing ground realities of politics in the Himalayan belt extending from Jammu and Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, leading up to the northeastern states of India. It recaptures the democratisation process at different structural levels, its legitimisation and internalisation among different actors and constituencies, causing a wide range of democracy to exist, from ‘social’ democracy, ‘transitional’ democracy to ‘degenerated’ democracy. This work can be of immense help to policy makers, specialists, researchers and students of sociology, anthropology, area studies, development studies, and Tibetan and Himalayan studies.
Keeping in view, the arising geopolitical dimensions in the South Asian region where befriending the local regimes of Himalayan nations and states by powerful nations has become a new strategy, the Indian links need to be reinforced. At this juncture, such a book comes handy as it unabashedly highlights why the state development plans have got strayed, how to tackle the minority representation issue, what are the numerous ethnic strives about, who should avail reservations in education and jobs, how identity politics is played out, whether the local governance model works, which group corners political autonomy, rearrangement of political ideologies, how global ideas influence these areas, how ethnic ‘homeland’ ideas emerged, etc.
Across the breadth of the book, which is divided into two parts, there are magnificent insights into the encounters of ethnically diverse population with Western liberal democratic values through various essays. Each essay is adapted into a chapter of its own; they are rich ethnographies and historical analysis of the workings, contestations and undermining of democracy. In this process, it not only demonstrates many experiments held with democracy but also presents a near to home opportunity for witnessing evolution of modern nation state and identity. The two sections which are titled ‘Identity Politics and Democratic Transition’ and ‘Development of Democratic Routes’ bespeak of ethnic revival and routeing of representative democracy.
This book prompts one to remember Anthony Gidden’s ‘the third way’, which aims to promote a diversified society based on egalitarian principles. The Himalayan region has a diversified population given that there are many isolated terrains, and that different groups have settled down here and developed cultural traits by adapting to and adopting from locales. In this mosaic of identities, a need is felt to stitch them together into a kind of political institution which would bring satisfaction to them. But the investigations led by these authors into the cultural lives of people that accompany their political garb is testimony of the fact that their society today wants better recognition of their interests at various levels even at the expense of trolling egalitarian principles in democracy.
The authors read beyond the crude stereotype of clashes between the indigenes and state over development projects. They attempt to identify and explain the wide range of ways the ethnic groups use to interact with statist plans, when ethnic minorities demonstrate against development project, when the livelihoods of people are at peril due to state’s protectionist regime and also when people get evicted from their homelands. Such an exercise has served to analyse the functioning of democracy that has traversed from being empowering, to restitutive, to participatory and to floating/territory-less democracy.
At the very outset, the authors acknowledge the daunting task of constituting a volume on Himalayan democracies. First, there seems to be a lack of good scholarly articles on the democratic processes and political transitions that took the particular experiences and experiments of democracy in the eight northeastern states of India beyond its boundaries. Neither have they ever been connected with the other Himalayan states of India nor have they been correlated with the neighbouring nations of Nepal and Bhutan. Second, to give political sociology of the Himalayan region its due place in Indian sociology. Their aim was to dislocate the Himalayan studies in India from margins and bring to the centre stage of Sociology of India and South Asia, a task which shall take longer to accomplish, given that there will be a sequel. Nevertheless, it has had a good beginning and will definitely make a mark in the field of sociology.
Given the magnanimity of the task—to achieve a Himalayan perspective on the process of democratisation, the many challenges present and the paradoxes in it—no doubt a tough deal, this volume seems to have given way to pressure. It has not managed to break away from its India-centric approach to understanding rooting of democracy in the neighbouring states as the impact of Indian states and central government policies on these nations still looms large.