Abstract
Democracy is a form of government ‘of the people, for the people and by the people’ where the driving force is its people and more particularly its citizens. In India, in the disastrous phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of democracy in tackling the crisis has come into prominence, especially in rural India where the sudden lockdown devastated the lives of many people who already migrated to cities for better livelihood. At this juncture, the book under review by Mukulika Banerjee, a leading political anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is dealt with the era of degenerating democracy in which success is only possible when its citizens are dynamically engaged in the process that creates the spirit of republicanism. Dynamic engagement denotes the process where citizens’ responsibilities are enacted and thus makes the politician more accountable in inculcating values of ‘civic commitment’ and solidarity (cultivating democracy). The study, further, tries to encapsulate the political identity of India which is not only determined by a vertical relationship between the state and citizens (formal citizenship) but also by a horizontal relationship among citizens (substantive citizenship), thereby creating the bonds of mutuality and the establishment of social citizenship (republic of fraternity). This idea is also supplemented by the author by bringing Ambedkar’s ‘social democracy’ which is free from unbending social behaviour and is impossible without active and vigilant citizens.
This ethnographic study covers the period of 15 years from 1998–2013 that studies two agrarian villages (rural, communist, and mostly Muslim) of West Bengal (Madanpur and Chishti) and nine different elections so as to make a linkage between formal political institutions and citizenship. This phase witnessed three particular changes in Islam, in paddy cultivation and in politics. Interestingly, this period witnessed the dominance of two different parties: the rule of communist parties in the first 10 years and after that, the rise of the Trinamool Congress after 2011. Segmented into seven chapters covering four events—a scandal, a harvest, a sacrifice and an election—the book shows how these events in the agrarian setup of village India produce democratic values and culture in thriving political institutions. To have a theoretical connection with the agrarian social setup, the author brings the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ by Charles Taylor which signifies how people imagine their social existence, which is widely shared, understood and reproduced by society at large. The core of the book is, thus, ‘the social imaginaries of agrarian life generate values that share an affinity with, and provide a resource for, republican democratic practice of India’ (p. 6).
In the first event of the ‘scandal’, Banerjee shows how the village people come together to resolve the scandal caused by the intervention of a village comrade. The author highlights the political behaviour of its people through the establishment of kinship, friendship and shared agricultural work, thereby challenging the hegemonic hold of the comrade within the society. In the chapter, ‘Harvest: Cultivating Cooperation’, the book focuses on agriculture and how with the active involvement of village sharecroppers it has become a collective activity in producing a good harvest. In fact, despite being of lower caste status, the sharecroppers enjoyed more decision-making power than the landowners. This form of cooperation establishes a renewed consciousness of solidarity for a common good. While proceeding to the event of ‘sacrifice’, the author encapsulates the values that are produced by rituals which is a non-political event, yet helps in establishing democracy with renunciation, distribution and egalitarianism. The final event of ‘election’, the only political event discussed in the book, deals more with active citizenship with rights and responsibilities. Linking it with the ‘scandal’ caused by the village comrade, the villagers not only resist the hegemonic tendency of the leader but also created a shared awareness to have a political alliance with people through ‘compromise and accommodation’ (p. 152). The election is explained as a collective exercise that is based on each individual’s active participation to create democratic cultures.
In the later part of the discussion, Banerjee tries to engage with values that are fabricated in social life such as cooperation so as to attain a common goal, collective interest against selfish interest and a process of redistribution to those who have less. These values are critical for the establishment of active citizenship with an aim of establishing substantive democracy. Therefore, the continuous engagement of both political and non-political social aspects is the determining force to establish the democratic and republican values of the Constitution of India.
Cultivating Democracy is, therefore, well-researched work on substantive democracy with its emphasis on republican components. The book—despite incorporating the core values of village India—reaches the legal institutional model of citizenship whose success is ineffective without active social solidarity. Though social solidarity takes prominence in the book, yet the author is less involved in understanding the plight of those sections of the society, who despite its formal status as citizens are highly ignored in the greater social set up. Moreover, the book did not go deeper in dealing with the question of gender in the social setting of village India. How is today’s democracy contested is also less examined in the book. Despite its limitations, the book is a prominent work on Indian democracy that comprehensively analyses the core ideas of democracy and republicanism. Academicians and scholars, who want to study Indian democracy, would get a comprehensive theoretical debate on it with empirical evidence.