Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India

334 Pages·2016·1.797 MB·English

by  Ranabir Samaddar

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).
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Ideas and Frameworks
of Governing India
Ranabir Samaddar
First published 2016
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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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
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ISBN: 978-1-138-67023-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-61772-5 (ebk)
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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.