Abstract
Both within India and outside, and within the academia and the activist circles, the enterprise called politics in India receives a mixed response. On the one hand, there are celebratory voices arguing that democratic politics in India has successfully entrenched itself while on the other hand, there are criticisms of its inadequacies. This is natural given the complex nature of India’s politics and vast terrain that it covers from the production of ideas and attempts at social reconstruction to shaping public policies and contestations over public goods. This complexity and multifarious nature makes the study of politics in India a very attractive and challenging proposition. A large body of scholars—within India and based outside of India—is currently engaged in this study and a still larger body of students and teachers are consumers of the literature that is produced on India’s politics. Even after six decades of its democratic experience, India’s politics continues to attract attention because of the acute challenges it encounters.
With more than half the world’s population living in democratic polities, it is only natural that the democratic experience of India should throw up many lessons (and paradoxes) for practitioners as also students of democracy across the globe. Many experiments that have taken place in India have relevance for other democracies. As theorization of democracy undergoes a transformation, an awareness is growing that what happens in India and such other relatively ‘newer’ democracies, may actually be more normal than experiences of the ‘older’ democracies. This generates renewed interest in India and similarly situated societies. Politics in India also throws up a challenge in that its record of running institutions is not very strong but the spread of the democratic norm is strong enough to tide over the crises of institutions. In sum, there continues to be a divergence of assessment of what has been happening in India’s politics. The debate between the ‘Idea of India’ and the ‘Indian Ideology’ captures the contours of the academic concerns that India’s politics produces.
The aim of this new journal, Studies in Indian Politics will be to bring to its readers, through its pages, these concerns and debates. Therefore, this journal will focus exclusively on ‘Indian politics’. While we employ the terms ‘politics in India’ and ‘Indian politics’ almost interchangeably, we are aware that what is ‘Indian’ about Indian politics is itself a question worth investigating.
A brief explanation about the scope of ‘Indian politics’ might be in order as we place before scholars and researchers the first issue of Studies in Indian Politics. Four pairs of activities and intellectual inquiries form the broad field called Indian politics.
The first pair consists of the issue of processes/ideas. The field of Indian Politics, as it has developed, mostly suggests that it is a somewhat restricted area of study focusing on the political process as it unfolds in India in contemporary times and the immediate past. However, a range of ideas that evolved at least over the last couple of centuries beginning with the colonial advent in India (and indeed much before that as Rajeev Bhargava’s article in this issue shows) shaped the way people understood politics and the way political actors engaged in the political activity. This foundation of ideas does not necessarily limit itself to the modern colonial. Both during the colonial period and after that intellectuals and political actors have sought to situate political action in the context of modes of thinking and epistemological categories that precede the colonial encounter. Thus, ‘Indian politics’ is not just about the processes as they evolve, but about ideas that inform and shape that evolution.
The second pair consists of politics/public policy. As the discussion in Ghanshyam Shah’s article shows, the two are closely intertwined. Since the formation of India as a formal state, India’s ‘politics’ has been preoccupied with issues of national state consolidation and issues of welfare and well-being of its citizens. Contemporary politics in India is as much about elections and party political contestations as it is about policy formation and policy choices. This is reflected in the disciplinary ambiguity of the study of public administration (a point elaborated in the Note by Rajeshwari Deshpande). Whereas some universities in India prefer to have separate departments of Public Administration, many prefer a unity of political science and public administration. In particular, with the rise of study of public policy as a major concern, the dichotomy of politics and public administration as arenas of collective action has receded into the background. A student of Indian politics today cannot afford to be ill-informed about issues dominating the public policy discourse and those studying public policy cannot afford to ignore the political dimension of policy choices.
For too long, however, the study of domestic politics and what is known as ‘foreign policy’ has remained separate. Of course, perceptive studies of India’s foreign policy have not forgotten the domestic concerns that predominate in making of foreign policy. As a sub-disciplinary convenience, the two may exist separately, but an understanding of their overlap and mutuality is always enriching for the observer. Both, the first wave of non-alignment and subsequent adaptations in the times of post-Cold War global politics happened on the foundation of national interest. The emphases in foreign policy and the shifts therein not only reflect India’s changing understanding of the global scene, they also reflect the internal changes in party politics and the rising regional assertions that dictate foreign policy choices rather than mere ‘national perspective’. The theme of national/regional plays out equally in domestic choices and in making of foreign policy. Thus the idea of ‘Indian politics’ incorporates the domestic politics/foreign policy pair.
Fourthly, competitive politics itself is made up of a dichotomy that needs to be grasped and resolved if we were to make sense of ‘Indian politics’. This refers to the party politics/movement politics tension. Competitive politics during colonial period arose through the apparatus of movements. Even after independence, this trend continued and movements came to be highlighted as a corrective to competitive party politics. We can make sense of politics in India not by keeping these two apart but by taking note of them together. Politics is not only about elections and party activities; it is also not only about counterclaims by non-party actors and the movement sector that seek to change, radicalize or cleanse politics. Study of Indian politics therefore, would mean study of both these arenas and their tense relationship.
In this sense, this journal will broaden the scope of what is understood as constituting Indian politics. We shall be more than happy to consider contributions from this broader range of academic/intellectual concerns that seek to make sense of Indian politics.
While the focus of the journal is on Indian politics, we are open to discussions of comparative nature where politics in India has a bearing on politics of some other societies or where global trends have impacted India’s politics. We also believe that there is much to gain by comparing political processes at the state level within India. Through such cross-country and within-country comparisons, this journal hopes to contribute not just to the field of Indian politics, but the fields of democratic politics and comparative politics as well.
The journal will not restrict itself to any one method or approach to the study of politics. While debates over the issue of methods would continue, each method offers its own vantage point to look at the phenomena under study. Different phenomena and curiosities lead to the difference in the method adopted. Adopting a particular method also depends on one’s approach to knowledge of the social phenomenon. Therefore, we not only believe in openness on the issue of methods and methodological pluralism, we also believe that a combination of methods as characterized by multi-method strategy might yield better results. Besides welcoming contributions following different methodological approaches, a small section (Notes on Methods) in each issue will be devoted to the discussion of methods and methods-related experiments. In this first issue, Divya Vaid delineates the nature of this discussion and we are also thankful to her for having agreed to steer this section in subsequent issues. Discussion of methods in most research circles in India including university departments either takes place in isolation of actual research practices and research questions or takes place in the older context of the debate over positivism. We hope to add a richer dimension to this debate—the actual practice of the different methods and its linkage to research question and capacity to yield an understanding of the phenomena investigated. Being a journal of ‘Indian politics’ the emphasis of this methods-related discussion will of course be on how best to investigate questions pertaining to Indian politics; though an occasional discussion of more general debates is possible.
The study and research of Indian politics is also characterized by a variety of approaches—sometimes related to but often independent of—issues of methods. Researchers often debate the relative importance of the institutional approach, the comparative approach, the political economy approach and so on. While we encourage submissions from different standpoints, the journal also hopes to host a discussion on how best to decide the relative weight of these approaches in the study of Indian politics. For this purpose, apart from methodological pluralism and a small section on methods, we shall also give space to a discussion of issues related to curriculum, pedagogy, textbooks and research agenda. As the opening note on this theme by Rajeshwari Deshpande (who will also coordinate this section titled, Teaching–Learning Politics in India) in this issue indicates, this discussion will often go beyond the study of Indian politics. It is only in the larger context of teaching and learning of political science that the study of Indian politics can be situated. At the same time, we shall be more interested in issues pertaining to study of political science in the Indian context—the way in which the discipline has shaped so far, the intra-discipline balance among various sub-disciplines, the research focus, issue of language, etc.
The journal will have a strong Book Review section under the stewardship of Philip Oldenburg and Ujjwal Kumar Singh.
When one looks back at the evolution of the study of Indian politics, one cannot but remember the seminal contribution made to this enterprise by Rajni Kothari through his much acclaimed works, Politics in India and Caste in Indian Politics among others. Besides shaping a critical analytical sensibility about Indian politics, Professor Kothari also happens to be the founder of the now fifty years-old institution that will run this journal—the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). In this first issue of Studies in Indian Politics, therefore, we pay our tribute to Rajni Kothari. Professors Lloyd and Susanne Rudolphs, Kothari’s contemporaries, situate his work in the larger context of his contribution to the discipline in India. James Manor then places Kothari’s Politics in India within the larger body of his work and Yogendra Yadav more specifically brings out what that work can teach the newer generations of students of Indian politics.
As we present the readers with this first issue, a word is needed about the institution that will steer this journal. CSDS is one of the premier social science research institutes in India supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Since 1997, it is running a research programme on comparative democracy, called Lokniti. This programme is better known for the rejuvenation of the election study tradition in India; but it has also undertaken a host of studies since its inception. Apart from being a research programme of the CSDS, Lokniti also has a distinction in that it is a large network of political scientists from India who engage in collaborative work in the area of Indian politics. The objective of this network is to strengthen empirically grounded but theoretically oriented study of Indian politics. CSDS has been a generous institutional node around which this network first emerged and then flourished over the last decade and a half. But for the CSDS, Lokniti, both as a research programme and as a network, would not have been possible. We are glad that the journal is coming into existence in the Golden Jubilee year of the CSDS.
We hope that with the support of the CSDS, with support from the members of Lokniti network and with a positive response from the academic community, this new journal will be able to make its mark in the field of study of Indian politics.