Post on 10-Mar-2015
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Published in Ajay Gudavarthy (ed), 2011, Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society, London: Anthem Press
Political Society in a Capitalist Worldi
Swagato Sarkar1
Partha Chatterjee is one of the very few scholars in India who have systematically
tried to theorize the specificity of Indian democratic politics. His conceptualization of
political society can be seen as an approach to explicate the latter’s logics. This
conceptualization has been modified and refined over the years by mediating on the
concrete historical experience of a postcolonial country and through a critical
engagement with the received Western normative political theory. In this paper, first, I
will provide a sketch of Chatterjee’s criticism of the concept of civil society, and then
present a critical review of his concept of political society. I will focus on the three
tension-ridden components of his project: the defence of a communal way of life,
mapping the differentiated political space, and a suspicion towards constitutionalism,
and thereafter, provide an alternative normative framework. I will argue, against
Chatterjee, that the concept of political society does not denote a positive political
development, i.e. does not present a possibility for ‘substantially redefining property
and law’ in favour of subaltern people/classes or ‘actual expansion of the freedoms of
the people’; rather it should be used to provide a critical insight into Indian politics,
particularly in relation to the process of capitalist expansion and differentiation.
CHATTERJEE’S CRITIQUE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
It is well known that the discussion on political society is embedded in the debate on
civil society and the critique of the conceptual infrastructure of Western normative
theory. In this debate, normatively, civil society has been identified as a domain for
the expansion and realization of rights and freedom (Cohen and Arato 1992), and
instrumentally, it is seen as a domain where the distribution, exercise and control of
1 Dr. Swagato Sarkar obtained his DPhil [PhD] from the University of Oxford, U.K. in 2009. He is the Assistant Dean (Academic Programme) and Associate Professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, Sonipat, Delhi NCR, India. Email: swagato.sarkar@gmail.com
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power are (democratically) contested (Nonan-Ferrell 2004). Taken together, civil
society is an integral part of democracy and a placeholder of institutions.
I will argue that Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Western normative theory and civil
society is primarily a critique of the subject (i.e. citizen) that this theory supposes. His
critique draws attention to the interpellative structure and the criteria of membership
of the institutions proposed/assumed by this theory, namely, the erasure of difference
in favour of formal equality and freedom (Chatterjee 2004). The effect of this formal
interpellation is that the state in its conduct can recognize or favour citizens only as
unencumbered individuals, severed of any primordial ties – a product of Western
humanism and secularism. Since the primordial identities of the citizens are not
invoked or referred to, hence, they are rendered homogeneous before the state,
namely, as a nation. It is the will of the citizens, expressed as their generalized
political aspiration and popular sovereignty, which gives legitimacy to the state and
forms the basis of democracy.
Here, Chatterjee posits the concrete postcolonial context against the normative
concept of civil society, and argues that only a handful of the ‘elites’ in post-colonial
countries can meet such a criterion of citizenship. These elites are the product of
inherited modernity (from colonialism), who can meet the demand of being
unencumbered either because they are cultured/socialized into such a being, or can
simply afford to ignore/avoid their primordial identities. Hence, the scope of the
concept of civil society is restrictive. This (normative) theoretical position is also
problematic because the concept of ‘community’, which provides meaning to most of
the people in these countries, is suppressed and relegated to the pre-modern historical
time (Chatterjee 1998 and 2004). Therefore, civil society is a limited normative
concept and an undifferentiated space.
Put differently, Western normative theory finds only a section of the postcolonial
society as the true bearer of modernity. One can note that, by foregrounding
communal being (and identity), Chatterjee differentiates ‘community’ from civil
society in an ontological way, i.e. a way of life based on a shared kinship (see below),
rather than a contractual (and formal) associational life in civil society. He proposes to
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split the political space, and to conceptualize a domain, separate and distinct from
civil society, i.e. political society.
Thus, there are three issues which are at stake here: (i) the difference in ontology
(/particular ways of life), (ii) the differentiation of political space, and (iii) the
significance of formal and normative concepts vis-à-vis empirical context. Chatterjee
tries to engage with these three issues to provide a theory of political society which
will demonstrate the democratic urge and the expansion of freedom of the members of
political society (i.e. subalterns) in India and other postcolonial countries. In other
words, he attempts to develop a normative theory of (populist) democracy based on
the experience of postcolonial countries like India.
CHATTERJEE ON POLITICAL SOCIETY
Chatterjee’s advocacy for the identification of a different political space beyond civil
society rests on three moves. First, he focuses attention on the sphere of governmental
interventions where, he claims, a different kind of political engagement between the
legal-bureaucratic apparatus and the people who are excluded from civil society can
be witnessed.
The post-colonial Indian state inherited the legal-bureaucratic apparatus, which is able
“to reach as the target of many of its activities virtually all of the population that
inhabits its territory, [whereas] the domain of civil social institutions, [….] is still
restricted to a fairly small section of ‘citizens’” (Chatterjee 2001, 172). According to
Chatterjee, this is a new paradigm, and there is a clear shift from the abstract
theoretical domain of citizenship to the actual domain of (public) policy. Following
Foucault, he claims that the domain of policy is predicated upon a conception of the
society as one constituted by population, not citizens or “elementary units of
homogenous families” (Chatterjee 1998, 279; 2001, 173). “The regime secures
legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in the matters of state, but by claiming
to provide for the well-being of the population” (Chatterjee 1998, 279). Thus,
Chatterjee’s first move shifts the focus of political theory from the normative category
of ‘citizen’ to the descriptive and empirical category of ‘population.’
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The concept of population is predicated upon an enumerable, descriptive, and
empirical ‘mass’ of people, and does not rely on a normative theory or abstraction.
The population is “assumed to contain, large elements of ‘naturalness’ and
‘primordiality’; the internal principles of the constitution of particular population
groups is not expected to be rationally explicable since they are not the products of
rational contractual association, but are, as it were, pre-rational” (Chatterjee 2001, 173
and passim). The concept of population offers the governmental functions and
apparatus an access to “a set of rationally manipulable instruments for reaching [a]
large section of the inhabitants of a country as the targets of ‘policy’.”
Chatterjee makes the second move by arguing that such interventions in the society-
as-population, if we may call it, and the interaction between these governmental
apparatus and the population groups inaugurate a new site for strategic manoeuvring,
resistance and appropriation. Chatterjee calls this site political society. The strategic
manoeuvre and mobilization that take place in this domain neither always conform,
nor are consistent with, the principles of association in civil society – they often result
in the transgression of law. Yet, Chatterjee identifies an ‘urge for democracy’ in this
mobilization in political society, as it channels the demands on the developmental
state – the state that looks after its people and provides benefits. Therefore, the subject
at this stage of his argument is a ‘subject of development’.
The third move is made by translating the ‘subject of development’ into a ‘political
subject’, by assigning an identity to it and finding a normative ground for it.
Chatterjee is interested in exploring how people use the space opened by the
intervention of governmental functions. As we have seen, such interventions perceive
the society as population and then categorize the latter into empirical groups which
become the ‘target’ for policies. However, such categorization also infuses a new
identity within the group, and many a time, the constituents of the group emerge as
distinct political entities. These new groups have a territorial boundary, “clearly
defined in time and space” (Chatterjee 2004, 58 and passim). Consistent with his
critique of civil society and the foregrounding of community, Chatterjee tries to
demonstrate how these groups become a ‘community’ – and thus a collective, and
also finds a normative ground for the latter’s demands. According to him, since the
livelihood and existence of many of the members of such groups are predicated upon
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a (collective) violation of (property) laws, they appear as ‘illegal entities’ before the
state. They are not recognized as proper civic bodies, pursing legitimate objectives.
Thus, to be recognized by the governmental functions, they must “find ways of
investing their collective identity with a moral content” (ibid 57 and passim) and
thereby “give to the empirical form of a population group the moral attributes of a
community” [emphasis in original]. Yet this community is about “the shared interests
of the members of association... they describe the community in […] terms of a shared
kinship…the most common metaphor… is that of a family.”
Chatterjee never spells out what he means by the ‘moral content’ of an identity, but it
seems that these new groups appropriate the proposition of the “government’s
obligation to look after the poor and underprivileged population groups” (Chatterjee
2004, 60). The objective of their mobilization is to “secure the benefits of
governmental program[me]s” (Chatterjee 2004, 66), which they claim as “a matter of
rights and use their association as the principal collective instrument to pursue that
claim” (ibid 59). This, according to Chatterjee, is a clear break with the erstwhile
patron-client exchanges, and an indication of their political assertion.
Chatterjee explains that the mobilization which takes place on the terrain of political
society is “necessarily temporary and contextual”, and “depends entirely on the ability
of particular population groups to mobilize support to influence the implementation of
government policy in their favour” (Chatterjee 2004, 60, emphasis added. Note:
implementation, not policy formulation, as he has already mentioned, “The regime
secures legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in the matters of state, but by
claiming to provide for the well-being of the population” (Chatterjee 1998, 279)).
Such strategic politics must operate within the constellation of the (mainstream)
political formations (i.e., parties, but also non-governmental organizations?). The
success of such strategic manoeuvring depends on “applying the right pressure at the
right places in the governmental machinery” (Chatterjee 2004, 66). However, they do
not always have access to such ‘right places’, and therefore, “(t)o produce a viable
and persuasive politics of the governed, there has to be considerable act of mediation”
(ibid 64). Hence, there is a real need for finding trustworthy mediators who can
represent them.
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It is through such political engagements that people are “substantial[ly] redefin[ing]
property and law within the actually existing modern state” (Chatterjee 2004, 75) and
“are devising new ways in which they can choose how they should be governed...
people are learning, and forcing their governors to learn, how they would prefer to be
governed…[which itself is a] good justification for democracy” (ibid 77-78).
A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF POLITICAL SOCIETY
As mentioned earlier, Chatterjee’s critique of civil society is predicated on the critique
of the subject that Western normative theory supposes. Furthermore, his
conceptualization of political society is predicated on the difference in the modes of
“transacting business with the constitutional state” (Chatterjee 1998, 282). The
modality of realization of rights is what, then, separates political society from civil
society. The difference in ontology which Chatterjee introduced at the beginning of
his critique of civil society – by foregrounding the lived experience of a ‘communal’
being, as opposed to the associational life of the unencumbered modern individuals in
civil society – is replaced with a critical appraisal of the procedural dimension of
Indian democracy (involved in ‘transacting business’, as quoted above). Even though
‘community’ is invoked in the discursive construction of the political subject, the
successful manoeuvring (including para-legal negotiations and transgression and
suspension of law) in political society is not dependent on that invocation; rather it is
dependent on the ‘majoritarian bias’ as we shall later see. In sum, the communal-
associational difference becomes untenable or insignificant as Chatterjee carries
forward his argument. While trying to explore the ontology of this later position, we
do not find any elaboration of the concept of the social. Rather, Chatterjee reads social
relationships and practices “in relation to the legal-political forms of the modern
state” (Chatterjee 2004, 74). He neither engages with the immanent antagonisms in
the social, nor with the quasi-transcendental conditions of possibility and
impossibility of political actions/interventions. To modify my last observation, I can
say that, at the ontological level, Chatterjee posits the difference between political
society and civil society in terms of the difference in the legal status of the entities
that the state encounters, and the contestation and negotiations which take place over
law, rules and norms become the focus of his analysis. It is therefore no surprise to
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see that the procedural dimension unfolds in terms of judging the legal status of the
means of the chosen economic activity by, and amenities for physical living of, the
members of political society. Political action is seen in terms of establishing the legal,
or transgressing the illegal, status within the black letter (property) law (which
becomes a referent point). Political space, then, is strictly the space of interaction
between the state and the ‘population’. Obviously, Chatterjee sees this in a positive
light.
Chatterjee argues that as the new political entities wrangle over property and benefits,
they also strike at the foundation of property relations. Property, Chatterjee reminds
us, is “the conceptual name of regulations by law of relations between individuals in
civil society” (Chatterjee 2004, 74 and passim). But as these “social relations” are yet
to be “mo[u]lded into proper forms of civil society, the state must maintain a fiction
that in the constitution of its sovereignty, all citizens belong to civil society and are,
by virtue of that legally constructed fact, equal subjects of the law.” This ‘fictional’
element must be addressed in the actual administrative processes.
The postcolonial (Indian) state not only finds a different legal entity/subject, but also
negotiates with it, instead of liquidating or banishing it. According to Chatterjee, this
negotiation does not take place because of the state’s benevolence; rather these
subjects force the state to do so. Therefore, a positive appraisal of political society is
pivoted on demonstrating the agency of the people in forcing the state to recognize
them. The normative dimension of political society becomes visible in terms of
delineating alternative (even if contingent) criteria for the recognition by the state.
The governmental functions and non-governmental agencies are forced to recognize
the ‘demands’ of the members of political society in a different way. Since, these
agencies do not recognize these members or groups as part of civil society, so they
cannot negotiate with them according to the formal and strict procedures and law of
the land, i.e. the so-called autonomy of the state is not obtained here. Hence, there is a
proliferation of layered mediations and para-legal arrangements to resolve various
contentious issues, and to meet the demands of these groups. The governmental
bodies and political representatives deliberate and negotiate to identify the valid
claims (Chatterjee 2004, 69). However, such negotiations must be hidden and not
formally recorded, as “(i)t is entirely possible that the negotiations on the ground did
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not respect the principles of bureaucratic rationality or even the provisions of law”
(ibid 73). Chatterjee appreciates this ‘para-legal arrangement’ and the actions in
political society as an act of “actual expansion of the freedoms of the people” (ibid, 66
and passim). Chatterjee argues that certain groups participate in political process
through manoeuvring in political society, which is otherwise not possible within the
liberal space of the associations of civil societyii. He claims that the transactions in
political society open up the possibility to “effectively work against the [existing]
distribution of power in society as a whole” (emphasis in original). This possibility,
according to him, is realized through the distribution of property rights. He briefly
refers to Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which “embod[ies] a set of substantive
freedoms rather than utilities or income or primary goods” (ibid 68) to support his
claim.
However, there is a limit to this ‘agency argument’, which also indicates the limit of
political society. First, there is a problem of scale. The very fact that (successful)
negotiations and the modalities of realization of rights in political society are
contingent and specific to a locale – the terminal stage of application of power,
therefore the methodology (mostly ethnographic case-studies) can enlighten us about
micro- and capillary- politics, but not about the macro processes. It will be difficult to
induce a general condition of freedom from such micro-political events even though it
affirms the liberal political theory which posits an agent (here, the ‘governeds’) who
experiences freedom, both in the negative and positive ways, but it does not
problematize the actual scale or type of the structural conditions. But, since Chatterjee
chooses to focus on property relationships and welfare benefits, therefore the
structural conditions which make capitalist expansion possible and to what extent the
members of political society can negotiate within capitalism and expand their freedom
are at stake here. Second, Chatterjee observes that the leverage in political society is
linked with the “inherent majoritarian bias of electoral democracy” (Chatterjee 2008b,
90 and passim). Because of this bias, certain sections of the population are excluded
from political society, producing newly marginalized groups, comprising of low-caste
and adivasi people. “Political society and electoral democracy have not given these
groups the means to make effective claims on governmentality. In this sense, these
marginalized groups represent an outside beyond the boundaries of political
societyiii.” This third space (after civil and political societies) is a new category in
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Chatterjee’s writing, which John and Deshpande (2008, 85) call the “liminal zone.”
Two points are to be noted here: first, the project (of political geography) to delineate
and exhaustively map the differentiated political space is under threat as we
continuously need to conceive new categories to capture this spatial differentiation
exhaustively – there is always a space which remains outside (here, ‘liminal zone’).
Second, the possibility of negotiation and transgression of law with impunity is
perhaps linked to this ‘majoritarian bias’ and the related capacity to form nexus by
both the elite and subaltern. As I mentioned earlier, the successful manoeuvring in
political society is not dependent on the communal way of life; if it were so, then the
stronger communal life of adivasi people would have secured them a place in political
society. Therefore, we need to question Chatterjee’s ‘communitarian’ and
postmodernist (/post-Marxist?) suspicion towards law and constitutionalism, and
argue that law, rules and norms can be both emancipatory and repressive and
disciplinary. In other words, the transgression of law and contingent para-legal
negotiations cannot solely secure the emancipatory possibility (i.e. actual expansion
of freedom) for the members of political society as Chatterjee argues. In the next
section I will elaborate and dwell upon these critical issues.
POLITICAL SOCIETY AS CRITIQUE
Now, it is pertinent to ask why Chatterjee theorizes political society in a statist/state-
centric and legalistic way. It might be helpful to refer to the original concept of
governmentality to understand that impulse. In developing the concept of political
society, particularly in terms of ‘the politics of the governed’, Chatterjee selectively
draws from the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. Governmentality, as we
know, denotes the generalized governmental rationality, beyond that of the state.
Methodologically, it studies the strategic field of application of power, whose
problematic is: “[H]ow best to govern[?]” (O’Malley et al 1997, 502).
Governmentality is about the organization of resources and institutions, establishment
of norms and practices, etc., and justifying this constellation. Thereby, as we know,
power assumes a productive dimension, rather than a negative and repressive one.
Thomas Lemke argues that the salient feature of Foucault’s conceptualization of
governmentality is that it “links technologies of the self with technologies of
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domination, the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state; and finally, it
helps to differentiate between power and domination” (Lemke 2002, 51).
Government refers to more or less systematized, regulated and reflected modes
of power (a “technology”) that go beyond the spontaneous exercise of power
over others, following a specific form of reasoning (a “rationality”) which
defines the telos of action or the adequate means to achieve it” (Lemke 2002,
53).
And thereby, “structuring and shaping the field of possible action of subjects” (ibid
52).
In Chatterjee’s conceptualization of political society and the case-studies that he
engages with, we never see the inter-linkage between the ‘technologies of the self’
and ‘technologies of domination’. What comes out, as mentioned earlier, is that the
process of surveying and categorization (which are not exactly the ‘technologies of
domination’) of the population are politicized, i.e. people use the very categories,
which are generated or used in surveys and censuses (which again are not exactly the
‘technologies of the self’), to stake claims on the state. Read this way, Chatterjee’s
notion of ‘governed’ as a subject of political society is nominal, and the process of
‘subjection to power’ in the domain of governmental/public policy – which is the
premise of Chatterjee’s argument – does not end up in producing/constructing any
subjectivity as such. And this happens, because governmentality is played out in India
exclusively within the body politic of the state, not beyond the latteriv. This statement
of mine might seem to be contradictory to Chatterjee’s (2008b, 93) later claim that
“governmental power [..] is no longer restricted to the branches of the state[,] but
extends to a host of non-state and even non-governmental agencies.” Chatterjee does
not define ‘governmental power’ explicitly; however, it is evident that he sees
‘governmental power’ to be beyond the state from the stand point of the institutional
space of application of power, but not from the problematic of ‘subject’,
‘subjectivity’v and rationality.
In Chatterjee’s writings, ‘governmentality’ is just an alternative way to understand the
interaction of the Indian state with the population, and does not refer to the
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generalized ‘governmental rationality’ or ‘logics’ – perhaps, that itself points to the
postcolonial predicament. A lack of mediation on this predicament makes political
society a theory of politicsvi – describing the modes of transaction between the state
and ‘governeds’. A description of the social conditions in which the ‘governeds’ find
themselves does not elucidate or clarify the ontology of the social, from which the
specificity of the postcolonial condition (and the predicament therein) – a sketch of
which is attempted below – can be explained or elaboratedvii. Without such a critical
engagement, Chatterjee remains within the liberal strand of political theory, where the
expansion of liberal institutional order is presented as an unlimited, albeit a hindered
or interrupted, process. Since Chatterjee does not read the practices of
governmentality as political logics, governmentality almost becomes a shorthand for
such a liberal political order, always already in a position to accommodate and
subsume various negativities, particularly in the context of capitalist expansion –
which is an evolutionist view of political order. Chatterjee does not deconstruct the
metaphysics (of presence) of such political practices which could point to the
impossibility of constituting an order and thereby also demonstrate (again) the limit of
naming a political space as civil or political society.
If the theory of political society has to be statist, then it might be more helpful to
conduct a thorough investigation of the ways in which the postcolonial state ‘transacts
business with the population’ and the consequences of that on the established laws,
rules and norms from various perspectives/standpoints. What comes out of
Chatterjee’s description in various cases (and many scholars would also attest the
factual basis of those) is that the postcolonial state is contradictory and indecisive in
its conductviii: on the one hand, it is marked by hesitancy and weakness in obtaining
compliance to the existing codified norms, and in enforcing certain legal and
executive orders, and on the other hand, it can be extraordinarily violent (i.e. in using
violent means and in violating the constitutional rights, legal provisions, and
procedures) – all of which cannot be solely seen as a response to the manoeuvring in
political society. The other side of this argument is that law and rules can be
transgressed by the powerful people to exploit the members of political society or to
cause misery and inconvenience to them (e.g. encroachment of village and forest land
by the mining companies in Bellary in Karnataka; diversion of PDS rice, etc.). We
also know that in the face of resource scarcity and other impediments, the actors, both
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the powerful people and the members of political society, practise “jugad”, i.e. they
arrange for themselves. It is also possible to provide alternative explanations for the
postcolonial state’s tolerance of violation of (public) property rights, particularly in
the context of informal economy. Barbara Harriss-White (forthcoming, n.p.) provides
such an alternative argument:
The state may also have an interest in sustaining petty commodity production
[the economic domain where the members of political society predominate].
Its infrastructural responsibilities to employers may be avoided if production is
outsourced to petty producers, and it often does not enforce laws through
which the super-exploitative advantage of petty production would be
abolished, or enforce fiscal measures that would threaten through taxation the
nutrient-bed of petty production. So small-scale production and trade also
thrive because the capital involved does not accumulate sufficiently for the
revenue from tax to outweigh the costs of its collection. The state also
‘inadvertently’ subsidizes and promotes production by small enterprises
through condoning and not policing the onward lending of ‘formal’ credit on
terms and conditions which prevent the borrowers from accumulating (and of
late through permitting a mass of more or less experimental micro finance
arrangements). It subsidizes and promotes the reproduction of small
enterprises through whatever infrastructural and welfare interventions are
aimed at the households involved in it. To prevent mass unemployment,
widespread malnutrition, etc, for several decades it has had to transfer
resources – more or less exiguously – for politically stabilising policies that
prevent the destruction of small scale production, trade and services. In doing
[so,] it creates small enterprises it cannot regulate[,] and incidentally also
restricts accumulation.
These contradictory and indecisive – and perhaps pragmatic – approaches of the state
indicate towards a predicament which underlines the power relationships in a
postcolonial country. This predicament has been conceptualised as the condition of
‘dominance without hegemony’ by Ranajit Guha. Guha defines hegemony, within a
field of power, i.e. a “series of inequalities” or “unequal relationships” (Guha 1998,
20), as “a condition of Dominance (D) such that, in the organic composition of D,
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Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C)” and “hegemony operates as a dynamic
concept and keeps even the most persuasive structure of Dominance always and
necessary open to Resistance” (ibid 23, emphases in original). ‘Dominance without
hegemony’ is the condition where persuasion never manages to outweigh coercion,
i.e. coercion becomes explicit in the formation and operation of power relationships. It
is this condition that propels the development of strategies of co-optation and
negotiations, in an attempt to defer or modify the (often inevitable) application of
force.
In the Indian context, the bourgeoisie never loses sight of its interest in accumulating
capital, yet adopts various strategies to dispel the antagonisms faced in that process
and negotiates with certain impediments. Does the Indian bourgeoisie manage to
persuade ‘the people’ to facilitate the process of accumulation or does it ultimately
depend on the application of force, or a mix of both? This question returns in the
context of the recent economic transformation in India, on which Chatterjee has
published two articles in 2008.
In the first article, Chatterjee (2008a) engages with the political economy of the recent
economic transformation in India to delineate the changing relationships among the
dominant groups. Here, the central problematic is the sole ascendancy of private
industrial-corporate capital in India to the position of hegemonic domination which is
accomplished with the ‘connivance’ [in my words] of the ‘urban middle classes’—
“the sphere that seeks to be congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil
society” (Chatterjee 2008a, 57) – and the parallel decline of the ‘agrarian bourgeoisie’
(ibid 56). Such ascendancy of industrial-corporate capital is rendered possible through
‘primitive accumulation’, namely, “the dissociation of the labourer from the means of
labour [i.e. production]” (ibid 54) and the attendant transfer of those means of
production to the capitalists. Chatterjee thinks that political society again becomes a
significant field of contestation and interventions in this new context: the need to
reverse the effects of the ‘primitive accumulation’ necessitates that the governmental
agencies engage with political society to distribute the benefits, following the
modality described above. But this contestation has been part of ‘passive revolution of
capital’ right from the beginning of the postcolonial state’s career, as can be gleaned
from Sudipta Kaviraj’s critique (which is seen from the stand point of the state).
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Kaviraj’s critique of ‘passive revolution’ is predicated on the proposition that “the
state in India is a bourgeois state (Kaviraj 1997, 48) which “helps in capitalist
reproduction” (ibid 49 and passim) when capital on its own cannot expand through
market transactions and therefore depends on “the legitimized directive mechanisms
of the state.”
Kaviraj observes, “the Indian capitalist class exercises its control over society neither
through a moral-cultural hegemony of the Gramscian type, nor a simple coercive
strategy on the lines of satellite states of the Third World” (ibid 51 and passim). Such
a control is achieved through a “coalitional strategy carried out partly through the
state-directed process of economic growth, partly through the allocational necessities
indicated by the bourgeois democratic political system” (emphasis added).
The (capitalist) dominance over the society is achieved through the practices of
governance, which according to Kaviraj, “refers to the process of actual policy
decisions within the apparatuses of the state” (ibid 54 and passim). The dominance is
created by establishing sets of “vertical clientilist benefit coalitionix” [emphasis in
original] between the ruling bloc and subordinate classes through certain policies.
Such an approach is concerned with the “calculations of short-term political
advantages accruing from policies.” The objectivex of establishing benefit coalitions
is to “ensure that actual political configurations do not become symmetrical to class
divisions in society.”
Though one can argue, after Kaviraj, that creating vertical clientilist benefit coalitions
is the logics of political society vis-à-vis capitalist expansion and ‘primitive
accumulation’, yet it will be difficult to normatively evaluate it as a positive
development (in terms of expansion of freedom). An ‘agency argument’xi is not
enough to salvage such an evaluation. This is because the very condition of capital
accumulation depends on creating such vertical benefit coalitions, which is a ‘social
cost’ to accumulation, and such a cost does not alter or threaten the course of
capitalist transformation and expansion (in an ontological sense, not a historicist
sense, and thereby not a question of teleological transition). I will argue that such
vertical benefit coalitions and para-legal negotiations are simply a factual and
15
descriptive state of affairs in the domain of power relationships, bereft of any
immediate normative problematizationxii. Since interventionist and transformational
politics requires a normative evaluation, and the significance and purchase of political
society depends on showing the actual expansion of freedom of the members of
political society, so it is also difficult to see any transformational potential of the
development of ‘political society’, parallel to ‘civil society’.
Let me summarize my critique of Chatterjee: The project of mapping the
differentiated political space or defending the communal way of life has not been
ultimately significant enough for Chatterjee to develop a theory of Indian/postcolonial
democracy; on the other hand, the practice of transgression of law, rules and norm in
India has to be accepted, but the point is whether we can undertake any normative
evaluation of this empirical context and proclaim that it helps in realizing the rights
and freedom of the members of political society. In other words, we need to question
whether the (political) sociological understanding of political society can help us to
develop a philosophical understanding of democracy in India. Alternatively, if the
transgression of law has to be taken seriously, then we should be able to use the
concept of political society to underline the undecidability and aporetic conditions
present in constitutionalism and in the process of realization of rights, justice and
freedom – which provides a critique of liberal theory of democracy, i.e. shows the
limit of democracy under capitalist system. This standpoint neither harbours a
Marxist/anarcho-communitarian suspicion towards constitutionalism, nor does it
attempt to furnish a liberal/modernist defence of the rule of law. This is what I mean
by ‘political society as critique’, which I elaborate below.
The context at hand is capitalist transformation which requires a reorganisation of
property relationships, mobility of capital, curbing labour rights, rationing social
benefits, grabbing resources and maintaining and enhancing the ‘value’ [actually,
price] of property through urban ‘development’ and beautification. Political society
can be a useful concept and an analytical tool to study the condition through which
antagonisms immanent and developed within this process of capitalist transformation
in a postcolonial country (i.e. the new frontiers of capitalist expansion and growth) are
deflected, deferred or nullified. The concept of political society therefore can be used
to critique this postcolonial condition. But that does not mean that we should overturn
16
Chatterjee’s insight and treat political society as a successful strategic field of the
dominant classes, which is structured to overcome the problematic of ‘dominance
without hegemony’, i.e. the development of non-coercive and persuasive political
condition for capitalist transformation. Violence is embedded in this process. Amita
Baviskar and Nandini Sundar (2008) draw attention to such an application of force
and infliction of violence in contemporary India. They argue that such an application
of force makes civil society “not a domain of hegemony”, “but of domination” (ibid
89), implying that the division and distinction of civil and political societies along the
axes of civility and legality is misleading.
If the concept of political society is to be treated as a critical tool, and no ready
transformational politics can be found within it, then the obvious question is: How
does one think about the political and transformational politics? Chatterjee’s critics
see politics in terms of contingency and the empirical specificity of a struggle, and fall
back on the ‘agency argument’. They suggest that in order to appreciate contemporary
subaltern politics, one needs to study the cases of resistance (John and Deshpande
2008, 86), to see the success in getting the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(NREGA), the Forest Act and the Right to Information Act as an outcome of people’s
“own degree of organization and their increased ability to speak in terms of the very
law that is used to dispossess them” (Baviskar and Sundar 2008, 88), and to look out
for “spaces, which the ruling classes are compelled to open up in an attempt to
legitimize their positions of power” so as to “(utilize) [those spaces] with a renewed
creativity by those fighting for a more equal, less exploitative social order” (Shah
2008, 81).
In reply to his critics, Chatterjee re-calibrates political society by introducing two
more concepts: “moral passion” and “populism” (populism is definitely a new turn in
his theorization). He explains:
…it is mistaken to claim that the dominant and propertied classes any longer
set the standards of morality for society; rather, in a democratic age, the moral
passion of entitlement and outrage is on the side of those who have little…
(Chatterjee 2008b, 92 and passim).
17
The political dimension in seen in terms of ‘struggle’ (clash and conflict) – not by
clarifying the negativity or antagonism at the ontological level (i.e. that what leads to
the conflict): “Since the intentions emerge from the arena of politics, it goes without
saying that they are shaped by the struggles between rival groups and classes in that
arena.”
The character of the politics which emerges in this field — a “field created by
governmentality”— is populist, and “populismxiii is the only morally legitimate form
of democratic politics today.” Thus, it seems that Chatterjee stands by his earlier
claim that the ‘politics of the governed’ is “shifting the historical horizon of political
modernity in most of the world” (Chatterjee 2004, 75).
This insistence on seeing political society as an innovative and promising political
development ignores the other possibilities of (progressive) political interventions.
The analysis of governmentality studies a very specify domain, namely the mode of
application and transformation in governmental rationality and power, and resistances
to it. This does not exhaust the possibilities of analysing other domains of power
relationships, the dislocating events within those, or anticipating other forms of
progressive political interventions. These limitations are also inherited by the analysis
of political society as such. Thus, the concept of political society as critique of Indian
politics is a much stronger position to defend.
Alternatively, we may adopt a different methodology to understand the political and
the transformational politics. We need to ask whether political theory should always
start with (a reflection on) the state and civil society, while trying to
understand/question the postcolonial political modernity. Instead of a statist/state-
centric normative discussion, can we not begin with the conceptualization of the
social, explicate its ontology, and then proceed from there to apprehend the quasi-
transcendental conditions of possibility and impossibility of political change?
CONCLUSION
18
I have argued in this paper that the concept of political society can be more useful as a
critique of Indian politics, rather than an alternative normative theory, which can only
extend the criteria of recognition by the state. What the concept of political society
warns us is that a certain section of the society is marginalized and that their demands
do not become part of mainstream political articulations in civil society. Political
society alerts us about various strategies that are being developed, how people use the
spaces available in a democracy to raise/place various demands, and how those
demands are dealt in a piecemeal way to mitigate antagonism and in facilitating the
‘passive revolution of capital’. Yet, such strategies cannot fully hegemonise ‘the
people’, and force the bourgeoisie to resort to violent means. Political society as
critique marks out the problematic of perseverance of the condition of ‘dominance
without hegemony’ and the return or the spectre of ‘the people’xiv in a democracy.
Chatterjee reminds us, “governmentality always operates on a heterogeneous social
field, on multiple population groups, and with multiple strategies” (Chatterjee 2004,
60 and passim). And we have seen that the politics in political society is “necessarily
temporary and contextual.” Thus, any political intervention that wants to overcome
this fragmentary and temporary politics would necessarily require an engagement in
hegemonic politics, a process of constructing a broader political movement beyond
the fragmentary ones. There are programmatic issues involved in such a
transformational politics; but any mediation on such political programmes cannot
begin without understanding the specificity of the postcolonial condition and
predicament, which in turn, requires an ontological analysis. The outcome of such an
analysis will not necessarily initiate transformation, but will at least provide a critical
insight about the political processes.
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ENDNOTES:
i This paper is a modified and expanded form of another paper published in 2008 (Sarkar 2008). ii This participation-through-manoeuvring is not based on a communal way of life, i.e. it is not a question of communal way of life helping in the formation of a group, analogous to the concept of class-in-itself. Successful manoeuvring depends on access to mediators, as we will see below. iii Samir Kumar Das argues that there are sections of the population who escape the calculative logic of enumeration and thereby they become the ‘ungoverneds’. But it is not clear why this should be the case, i.e. what kind of logical inconsistency or limit of governmentality is involved here is not readily understood. iv One can observe the nascent attempts at expanding governmentality beyond the state in projects like the Unique Identity. v This problematic is central in Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality. Refer to ‘Two Lectures’ by Foucault (1980), particularly pp. 97-98. vi I borrow the term ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ from Chantal Mouffe, where ‘the political’ refers to “the dimension of antagonism which [is] constitutive of human societies”, and ‘politics’ refers to “the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political” (Mouffe 2005, 9). vii Also, without such a consideration, the emergence of political subjects cannot be understood. The Foucauldian understanding of subject formation through subjection to power has been thoroughly criticized by Derrida. Refer to Derrida (1972 and 1973) and Ernesto Laclau (1990). viii Say the hesitancy of the erstwhile Left Front Government of West Bengal in the case of the rotting corpse of Balak Brahmachari of the Santan Dal (a religious sect) (Chatterjee 2004, 41-51), and the same Government’s use of police force, time and again, in suppressing and killing (political) dissidents (in Marichhjhapi, Singur and Nandigram). ix I will argue that this can be seen as the institutionalized form of the colonial idiom of ‘Improvement’, through which “the colonial rulers [used] to relate nonantagonistically to the ruled (Guha 1998, 30, emphasis added). x Arun Patnaik offered an alternative argument. Patnaik (1988, 30) found the poverty alleviation programmes and targeting the poor in the 1970s as the “state’s paternalistic
22
attitude to the rural poor”, through which the state “diffused among the poor peasants its own organizational contradictions and tried to wean them away from the social contradictions of the real life.” xi I will argue that the question of agency in these discussions always arises ex post facto, at the moment of attributing the credit (or autonomy) of the action to a particular subject. The question of identification and recognition of that subject is very much part of the above objective. Therefore, to consider the ‘agency’ as a (starting) premise of an argument is limited in explaining the case. xii One can develop this argument further by engaging with Jacques Rancière’s concept of politic(al/)s as ‘disagreement’ (1998 and 2004), which necessarily involves such a problematization. xiii In defence of ‘populism’, Chatterjee quotes Ernesto Laclau. But, I think, it is a misapplication. For Laclau (2007 and 2005), populism stands as a problematic of staging the people within democracy, which is preceded by a Claude Lefort-inspired understanding of power, which is empty (i.e. there is a lack) at the core, and hegemonic politics is practised in an attempt to fill or occupy that emptiness or lack. ‘People’ becomes the constituency constructed or is the locus in this hegemonic political practice. xiv The populist question, similar to Laclau and Rancière.