ebook img

Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India PDF

334 Pages·2016·1.797 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India

Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India and its companion volume Neo- Liberal Strategies of Governing India tell the story of governance in independ- ent India and address the critical question: how is a post-colonial democracy governed? Further, they attempt to understand why the process of govern- ing a post-colonial democracy, particularly in the neo-liberal age, should be studied as the central question within the history of post-colonial democracy. The volumes offer hitherto unexplored analyses of governance – political and ideological aspects along with technological characteristics – in a historical framework. This volume discusses: • ideas and issues at the core of governance in post-colonial India • constitution, state-making and government formation • the asymmetrical nature of the anti-colonial foundations of governance. In breaking new ground in the study of what constitutes the political sub- ject, these volumes will be indispensable to scholars, researchers and students of politics, public administration, development studies, South Asian studies and modern India. Ranabir Samaddar is the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at Calcutta Research Group, India. Among foremost critical theorists, he has worked extensively on issues of forced migration, dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. His significant interventions on justice, rights, peace, nation-state and critical post-colonial thought include The Politics of Dialogue (2004), The Materiality of Politics (2007), and The Emergence of the Political Subject (2009). His co-authored work Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of Urban Imagination (2013) examines new town and accumulation in the context of urban post- colonial capitalism. His co-edited volumes include Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India (2012), New Subjects and New Govern- ance in India (2012) and Conflict, Power, and the Landscape of Constitu- tionalism (2008). This page intentionally left blank Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India Ranabir Samaddar First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Ranabir Samaddar The right of Ranabir Samaddar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book. ISBN: 978-1-138-67023-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-61772-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements x PART I Ideals of governance 1 1 Radicalism, violence and the task of governing 3 2 Crisis in the nationalist ideal of self-governance 21 3 The power of the aesthetic and a different style of governing the self 39 4 Another idea of democratic governance 65 5 Citizen as a problem figure for governance 90 6 The religious nature of our ways of governing 107 PART II Law and regulations as the framework of governance 139 7 Rule of law in a society of unrest 141 8 Riot, police and the city 192 vi Contents 9 Two constitutional tasks: setting up a state and a government 238 10 Popular constitutionalism 278 Bibliography 306 Index 317 Preface In this book the founding history of India’s post-colonial governance is seen as constituted by two principal elements: (a) contesting ideas of self-government that have shaped the nature of governance and (b) an overarching framework made of constitutionalism, police and legality. In the companion volume the history of post-colonial governance is followed up through discussion of two more elements: (c) the mutu- ally constitutive relationship between rulers and the ruled based on popular claims, rights and the governmental process; and finally, (d) governance as a strategy of protecting private property, securing con- ditions of accumulation and rule. Together these two volumes on governing India aim not only to tell the story of post-colonial governance, but also present an answer to the vexing but significant question, namely, how is a post-colonial democracy governed? Or, to put it differently, why should we study the process of governing a post-colonial democracy as the central question in the history of the post-colonial democracy itself? In trying to answer, these two volumes take forward the ideas and analyses of governance proposed first in the two books on governance (Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India and New Subjects and New Governance in India, 2012) brought out by the Calcutta Research Group (CRG). The characteristics of those two volumes lay in combining analysis of the political and ideological aspects with that of the technological aspects of governance. This was important because the conventional books on governance had hitherto ignored the said dual nature of governance and had thus practically banished history from the study of governance itself. CRG’s massive collec- tive research on autonomy, social justice, governance, developmental democracy and citizenship enabled it to make the breakthrough. This book develops the insights of the two volumes and aims to present them in a historical frame. viii Preface In order to do so, this volume proposes to go back to some of the foundational issues of governance. Readers will not fail to notice the importance given in this book to the decade of the forties of the past century as the symbol of our contentious time. It was in that dec- ade that various ideas, actions and institutions in their combustible mixture foreshadowed the relations between nation, governance and democracy in the impending post-independent time. We have to admit that a fuller history of the significance of those ten years still waits to be written. The anti-colonial foundations of our politics are deep, and while some aspects of our anti-colonial consciousness and practices have faded with time, others have passed the test of the neo-liberal assaults of the past twenty odd years. The building blocks of anti- colonial foundations were not symmetrical. Their asymmetry became more evident as post-colonial governance developed. Part I is written on the basis of such an understanding. Part II follows this up through examining the process of transformation of the subjects into citizens. The book argues that it was not a simple story of enabling the people into rights-bearing subjects, but a complex story of the constitution of the political subject, which had within it, from the beginning, the possibility of governmental domination over a democracy, and thus citizens becoming mere objects of governance. It is in that intertwined narrative that we shall find the mutually conditioning account of the formation of a state and the making of rules on which post-colonial governance would be based. This is the reason as to why this book does not proceed much beyond the initial decades, except for one chapter where the foundational story of the religious nature of our governance had to be told in the form of narrating certain events from the recent past. But the question remains foundational. The place of the decade of the forties in the evolution of post-c olonial governance, however, is significant in a deeper way. If the forties showed new trends to be repeatedly observable in later years of our post-colonial life and how the nationalist ideas of autonomy would be caught in the vortex of the contentious events of the decade, they also showed how rules of governance assiduously built over a century could crumble within just ten years. The collapse of the colonial mode of governance (some of the elements of which would be rule of law, limited representation, administration geared to surplus extraction, rule based on difference, combining violent and suppressive mode with civilian mode of rule, centralization, iron conduct of bureaucracy and administration based on management of group relations) through war, Quit India Movement, Bengal Famine, Calcutta Killings, Parti- tion, a chaotic transfer of power, widespread agrarian unrest, mutiny Preface ix in the Royal Indian Navy and the institution of constituent assembly demonstrated the wide disconnect between the actually existing social and political life of the people and the rules of governance. The manu- als of administration and governance, one may say, were the displaced site of the political life of the people. In time these manuals along with other reports (particularly the reports of the Administrative Reform Commissions) and manuals added later, would aim at creating a sci- ence of governance, once autonomous and self-sufficient, in whose mirror the actual political life of the people would always appear as unruly and chaotic. That is the part to be described in detail in the companion volume. Issues of rights, entitlements, regulations, accu- mulation would feature prominently there. To arrive at such an understanding what was required was a clearer understanding of various ideas of governance in the form of self- governance, popular attitude to legality, the emergence of the city as the most dense site of claim-makings, the dual nature of the founding exercise of constitution-making, namely state building through elabo- rating the rules of governance, and the phenomenon of popular consti- tutionalism as distinct from governmental ideas of constitutional rule. Only on that account the later story could be meaningfully told. Also on that dual understanding one would be able to make sense of the materiality of our political practices, and the contradictory nature of our political subjectivity. There is one last comment as a preface to the arguments of this book. The underlying contention of this book is that there is no pos- sibility of breaking out of the bind in which the governmental question is locked in India today, unless we think in terms of radical democracy. The chapter on the religious nature of our governance shows how governance as a secular field of rule makes little sense till caste and religion operate as the masks of racism in the country. Our discus- sions on secularism had hitherto ignored the interplay of caste, race and religion. Similarly the chapter on other ideas of democracy and self-governance, for instance reflected in Jayaprakash Narayan’s writ- ings, discusses how the early post-colonial decades suggested such possibilities of radical democracy. However, most of the chapters are self-explanatory in the context of these introductory remarks. Given the remorseless nature of the capitalist accumulation process in India, these chapters are meant to prepare the ground in the companion vol- ume for an intense discussion on rights, claims and justice.

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.