The proposed study by Lokniti: Programme for Comparative Democracy has received a research grant from the Indian Council of Social Science Research as part of its call for proposals under the two themes -- ‘National integration: Old and New Bearings’ and ‘Democracy: New Publics’ .
The project contains a series of activities separate enough to be carried out by the coordinator of each activity, and yet together have an internal link that connects them to the two very important research themes identified by the ICSSR -- ‘National integration: Old and New Bearings’ and ‘Democracy: New Publics’ -- have deeper interconnections.
India’s six decades long experience as an independent democratic state has many achievements on its register of performance. Yet, the journey is full of anxieties and uncertainties about the present and the future. Many of these are rooted in the challenges faced by India as a nation. This challenge is in turn related to the less than successful evolution of the inclusive democratic public that could form the bulwark of the nation. Successful incorporation of hitherto excluded sections holds the key to ‘national integration’. Democratic contestation provides the terrain that permits and necessitates a negotiation about the terms of this incorporation. It is in this sense that the themes of national integration and multiple publics in a democracy overlap. The present proposal is situated at the intersection of these two themes.
The project of ‘building’ a nation called ‘India’ emerged in embryonic form in the early twentieth century. But the project acquired a practiced institutional framework only with independence. This project, while open to diversity, imagined one nation, a strong sense of national identity over-riding other identities, and along with single citizenship, it also presupposed a strong and singular public to constitute the bulwark of democracy and nationalism. These presuppositions met with varying responses in the post-independence period and by the last quarter of the twentieth century, the project of the national state began to face multiple challenges, thanks to intensification of democratic contestation.
The project managed to keep the dream of democratic national polity alive mainly by adapting itself to the dichotomy of the nation/region. But precisely this strategy of adapting to the nation/region dichotomy posed another challenge: democracy produced its own logic of multiple mobilizations and plural aspirations among different sections of the society. Therefore, while the democratic contestation was successful in fomenting a sense of oneness, it also produced the referents around which unitary conception of citizenship often faced a challenge. Democracy, as understood in the western sense of liberal democracy presupposed and required the formation of ‘the public’, while democratic politics in India produced, sustained and derived strength from the formation of competing ‘publics’, sometimes even contending ethnic nationalisms. This relates to the tension between ‘the’ public and (many new) publics. Besides, ethnicity, caste and religion worked often to produce and sustain mechanisms of domination and exclusion leading to debates about not only ‘unity and integrity’ but also fragmentation of the ‘public’.
This development gave rise to a debate puncturing and interrogating the authenticity of the idea of one Indian public. An older understanding of national integration, derived from the European experience, required a singular public to achieve a full nationhood for the newly created state. The experience of six decades of democratic contestation, electoral and otherwise, presses for a newer understanding of national integration, at home with sub-national claims and with multiplicity of publics. This specificity of the Indian experience gives us an exciting opportunity and responsibility as social scientists to investigate into the relationship between state-formation, nation-building and constitution of public(s) under conditions of democratic contestation. This understanding informs the present proposal.
The proposal
The past two centuries, starting with the activities of Ram Mohan Roy, represent a great intellectual and social churning in the Indian society that has shaped India’s collective self. The processes of shaping the collective identity were/are often mediated by three foci: region/language, religion and caste/tribe. These mediated shaping of the collective being of India. However, these three factors themselves get punctuated by the entry of class and gender challenging the homogenizing discourse of regional or religious or caste identity. Gender and caste intersected the universalizing claims of region religion and caste. This complex process gives rise on the one hand to competing conceptions of the nation and national identity and on the other hand this process also becomes constitutive of the idea of public/s. It is difficult to imagine any conception of the ‘public’ in the Indian context without reference to this overlapping and intersecting grid of claims and counterclaims.
Debates about whether India is a nation or conglomeration of nationalities or whether state-ness forms the basis of the Indian nation continue to occupy the public intellectual space as much as they occupy the social scientific space in the Indian academia. However, these debates have never been isolated from political claims—they were as much as debates about who are the citizens of India. Just as there have been claims about the multiple ideas of nationhood, there have also been denials about the singular publics that constitute each of these ’nations’.
What is fascinating about these intellectual as well as socio-political processes is that they were all deeply rooted in and influenced by the logic of democratic politics. The idea of democracy has allowed many contestations, has called for redefinitions of identity claims and above all, produced the ideas of citizenship and publicity. Democratic politics has also ensured that the effects of discrimination and exclusion, either rooted in the past or emerging from more contemporary structures of domination, will be blunted or at least challenged. It may perhaps be accurate to say that most structures of exclusion are increasingly losing their capacity to legitimize exclusion. Thus, while exclusions—either from nation or from the public---may continue, they are seen for what they are, viz., exclusions and hence unjustifiable or morally and politically unsustainable. Post independence political developments have speeded up and in some ways made more visible these interlocking processes of identity formation, claims on the nation and also evolution of different meanings of the nation.
This gives rise to many questions that the proposed programme will address:
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What are the spatial bases for these processes? Do they take place all over India in the same manner or are there regional variations? Why have some states developed a sharper sense of regional identity while others are less sharply regional? Why do some states give rise to mobilizations across caste blocs while some other states experience a quiet transformation of political power from one caste bloc to another? |
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What are the alternative routes for framing institutional policies for ensuring an inclusive polity? Do reservations help all communities equally or some communities would require a differential treatment to ensure their socio-economic advancement? |
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Does India’s democracy represent minority communities adequately or a representational lag produces democratic deficit? Is it the institutional mechanism that militates against the representation of the minorities or is it the political practice that effectively creates bottlenecks in democratic representation of minority communities? |
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What is the relationship between democracy and identity formation? Does democracy puts a premium on ethnic mobilizations and distinction between us and them? What is the relationship of ethnic identity with the idea of nation? Is the logic of ethnic mobilization fraught with self defeating possibilities? |
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What is the relationship between the institutional architecture and the dichotomy of nation/region? What is the role of federal institutions in resolving/ intensifying this dichotomy? |
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How does the evolution of new publics impinge on the idea of nation and national integration? How does India balance the regional aspirations with concerns of national unity? Do the social processes of exclusion and democratic process of inclusion intensify the struggle over the meaning of nationhood? |
Programme Components
These questions are only illustrative of the complex issues that arise once we comprehend the interconnections between the themes of national integration and democracy. In an attempt to diversify and integrate its studies of elections and public opinion, Lokniti aims at undertaking studies that would employ plural methodological pathways in order to engage itself theoretically and empirically with the questions such as those listed above. In a series of projects we propose to develop an understanding of these complexities of the relationship between nation(s), public(s) and democracy.
| I. |
One of the relatively neglected dimensions of shaping of the ideas of public and the shaping of identities has been the state specificity of these processes. Political developments of the ‘nineties have brought to our attention the significance of the state as an arena of democratic politics and the need to undertake comparative studies of the state level processes. Three issues that dominate and shape the democratic discourse in contemporary India are: caste, region and electoral competition. We propose to initiate a long term programme on comparative state politics by organizing annual conferences on comparative state politics under the title of ‘Comparing States: Towards a Better Understanding of Regions and the Nations’. In the first three years, we shall focus on the three themes listed above. Professor Rajeshwari Deshpande (Department of Politics & Public Administration, University of Pune) will coordinate these conferences. While we adopt the format of continuing conference, the proceedings will be based on predetermined topics and carefully written theme papers around which the deliberations will be held. |
| II. |
In the aftermath of the report of the Sachar Committee, a question of grave importance is facing the public policy process in India. It concerns the nature of policies to ensure just and fair access to public resources and opportunities as far as the minority communities are concerned. Focusing specifically on the Muslim community, we propose to undertake a review of the various proposals for affirmative action within a democratic framework and weigh their consequences both for the community and the larger public. This study will combine the data collected from library research and insights gained through carefully drafted case studies to arrive at policy suggestions on this question. Mohd. Sanjeer Alam (Associate Fellow, Lokniti, CSDS) will coordinate the study titled ‘Social Equity and Minorities: Designing Affirmative Actions for Muslims’. Through this study, we aim at connecting the debate about inclusive democracy to the making of public policy. |
| III. |
Democratic politics would ordinarily be expected to produce reasonable representation for various communities. However, the dispersal of the minorities coupled with the politics of majoritarianism can prove to be a hurdle in the adequate and meaningful representation of the minorities. Moreover, the pressures of mobilization and of responding to majoritarian politics create its own demands and distortions that shape ‘politics’ of political representation. We aim at analyzing this politics that involves the Muslim community through the project titled ‘Politics of Political Representation: Post Colonial Indian Democracy and the Political Participation of Indian Muslims’. This study will be coordinated by Hilal Ahmed (Associate Fellow, CSDS). In the context of post-Babri political conundrum, this study assumes significance. While majoritarianism produces politics of exclusion, the push for inclusion results in homogenization of a community that is politically and socially and economically as diverse as the rest of the Indian society. This development would be at the core of the study of politics of political representation. |
| IV. |
North East region of India is another locale that highlights the nation/region dichotomy in a vigorous manner. It also invites scholarly attention to the formation of newer identities and their tense relation with fraternal and ‘external’ collectivities. The project of ‘Identity Politics and Democratic Mobilization: North-East India’ to be coordinated by Sandhya Goswami (Professor, Dept of Political Science, Gauhati University, Guwahati) focuses on these issues. This project will look at the shaping of and mobilization of ethnic identities in the context of overall regionalization of the politics of North East and ask questions about whether North East constitutes one region or it is a terrain that is home to multiple regions within its ambit. |
| V. |
The fifth component of this proposal will be an assessment of the institutional framework in terms of their impact on national integration. We shall focus on two key institutions for this assessment—the Governor and the Rajya Sabha. A series of case studies will examine the extent to which these institutional mechanisms strengthen federative nationalism. The project ‘Integrative Elements in the Indian Federal System: Role of Federal Institutions in the Authentic Representation of Diversity’ coordinated by Sandeep Shastri (Professor and Pro Vice-Chancellor, Jain University, Bangalore), will begin with a concept note for discussion to which potential partners in the caste studies will be invited and after this round of discussion, case studies will be commissioned with a clear outline for each case study. |
| VI. |
Finally, it is proposed to undertake an overview of the emerging approaches to the idea of nation in contemporary India and how different claims and differential power relations have shaped them. While the review will situate the discussion in the larger historical context, the more direct focus of this review will be on the emerging issues that shape newer approaches to the theme of national integration. While this review addresses itself mainly to the theme of nation and national integration, it will implicitly, take note of the democratic processes that have a bearing on the evolution of these issues and approaches. This project titled ‘Negotiating Multiple Nationalism: Issues and Approaches to the Question of National Integration in Contemporary India’, to be steered by K C Suri (Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad), will also trace the evolution of various ideas through public political contestations. |
| VII. |
All these independent units of the larger proposal will be looking up to the Data Unit of the CSDS for baseline information on participation, democratic attitudes and public opinion on contested issues. It is well known that Lokniti has been conducting election studies and public opinion surveys on a regular basis since 1996. While these studies have produced writings on electoral competition in India, much of the data remains unused. The projects listed above will use the relevant data for which we would require assistance for Data Servicing and Data Management. This activity, apart from being auxiliary in nature, will also produce a status report on what the existing findings tell us about the issues of nation/region dichotomy and the exclusion/inclusion. |
These studies taken together cover a lot of intellectual ground. As stated initially, these studies integrally look at the concerns contained in the themes of National Integration and Democracy. They not only address the question of nation and national integration, but also aim at generating valuable and reliable data on the basis of which the academic discourse on the idea of nation may develop in the future. Secondly, these studies engage with the issue of what constitutes the idea of public and why there is a need to pluralize the vocabulary of public as also to diversify the policy approach for the benefit of the excluded publics. In turn, the pluralisation of public(s) and evolution of inclusionary mechanisms enhance a national identity that is not uncomfortable with the language and practice of diversity. In this sense, the studies proposed by Lokniti fit in both the thematics of Publics and National Integration and promise to enhance research, intellectual debate, training and dissemination for the younger academics and policy inputs for better and more democratic governance.
Administration of the Programme
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The overall programme will be coordinated by Suhas Palshikar, Director, Lokniti (Consent Letter enclosed) and Sanjay Kumar, Deputy Director, Lokniti Programme. |
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An Advisory Committee will guide and advise the researchers engaged in various studies under the proposal. This Committee may consist of Professor D.L. Sheth, Professor Ghanshyam Shah, Professor Rajeev Bhargava, Professor Gopal Guru and Yogendra Yadav. |
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Funds made available by the ICSSR will be routed through the CSDS to all individual projects listed above and the CSDS will be responsible for submitting audited accounts of all activities. |
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While Lokniti-CSDS will be the core institution, different universities/ research institutions will be encouraged to be partners in these studies particularly where the coordinator of the specific component is based in that university/institution. |
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