Towards a Political Sociology of Power in Post-Colonial India

Towards a Political Sociology of Power in PostColonial India Priya Ranjan Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociological Studies, Central University of South Bihar, Gaya Aditya Mohanty Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociological Studies, Central University of South Bihar, Gaya 1.Introduction: Modernity and democracy were regarded as the province of the West. The non-Western or postcolonial world was, by contrast, imagined as its Other: rooted in the traditions of the past, socially and economically backward, and unfriendly to representative democracy. Structural theories of society conferred scientific sanctity to these political differences between the modern West and the traditional non-West. But despite such patronizing preconceptions of the Western academy, mass democracy in postcolonial societies is flourishing today in distinctive (albeit vernacular) forms. For instance, levels of mass political participation, from voter turnout to non-partisan forms of civic activism, are appreciably higher among over two billion South Asians than in elitist democracies such as the United States where the poor are the least likely voters. It in fact makes one wonder as to how ordinary men and women experience and enact democratic politics in particular times and places, particularly in postcolonial contexts. It is in this spirit that the present paper in two sections elucidates upon how democracy enters a particular historical and socio-cultural setting and becomes ‘vernacularized’, and how through this process it produces new social relations and values which in turn shapes ‘the political.’ The First Section of the paper succinctly puts conceptualization of power dynamics through the canons of Western Political Theory. The Second Section, then helps us re-imagine power dynamics in postcolonial democracies as an interplay of capital and social clout. Finally, in the Third Section, it brings back this discussion of power dynamics in postcolonial democracies into the heart of a fundamental problem in classical political theory i.e., the crisis of legitimation. 2. Power Geometries through the lenses of Western Political Theory As far as the Eurocentric writings on power is concerned, prominent among them figures out the contributions of Marx (who saw it lying in the hands of the bourgeoisie), Weber (who saw in the ways in which it is translated into domination) and Gramsci (who considered it to be couched in the ideals of hegemony). To begin with, Marx (1970) has correctly noted that in each step of the develop322  62/3 ISSN 0975-735X ment of the bourgeoisie, there has been a corresponding political advance of that class. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. Weber (1978) noted that domination transforms amorphous and intermittent social action into persistent association. Domination exists insofar as there is obedience to a command. In general, obedience is due to a mixture of habit, expediency and belief in legitimacy. The subjects’ willingness to comply with a command is enhanced by the existence of a staff, which again acts based on habit, legitimacy and self-interest. Sociologically then, domination is a structure of super-ordination and subordination sustained by a variety of motives and means of enforcement. But he turns to legitimacy because of its inherent historical importance; the need of those who have power, wealth, and honor to justify their good fortune. Weber exemplifies the difference of domination from mere power with the case of monopolistic control in the market. In their own rational interest, the unorganized customers of a monopolistic enterprise may comply with its market dictate; this is domination by virtue of interest constellation. Through many gradual transitions, this relationship may be transformed into’ domination proper, that means, by virtue of the authoritarian power of command, as it prevails in the largescale industrial enterprise and on the manor-the two most important economic structures of domination. Following from the ideas of Gramsci (1971), the concept of hegemony relates to the nature of state power and its dominance. Dominance is coercive but it also has its moments of persuasion. Hegemony consists in moral and intellectual leadership that can impart direction to civil society and to secure its consent through persuasion. Moreover, though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. Gramsci defined a fundamental class as one engaged in such a decisive economic role. Thus, hegemony is composed of several complementary properties signifying the kind of dominance that lives more by consent and collaboration than by coercive subordination. In any struggle to attain hegemony or to retain it, a fundamental class is necessarily engaged in bringing the interests of other social groups in conformity with its own by means of ideological struggle. This is where the role of intellectuals becomes very important. It is not a matter of merely extraneous imposition of knowledge and consciousness. The means of hegemony are set forth by the kind of self-consciousness that grows to discover lasting allies for the cause of status quo or for desired changes in the prevailing order. Of course, it must be a political alliance, but not one reducible to a solitary function. There emerges a complex combination of ideas, beliefs, feelings, preferences and sentiments that go into the making of a “historical bloc” and its collective will. ISSN 0975-735X 2023  323 3. Unpacking a Postcolonial reading of Power Postcolonialism refers, broadly, to a range of critical anti-colonial perspectives that display an awareness of the ways in which five centuries of modern European colonialism continue to shape political ideas and practices, including those concerning the production of knowledge. The origins of postcolonial scholarship lie undeniably in the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. Figures such as M.K. Gandhi and Franz Fanon, for instance, criticized not only the injustices and violence wrought by European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, but also the intellectual bases of colonial modernity everywhere. Legitimating truths of colonialism such as racial hierarchies and the modernization of so-called backward places were objects of exacting analysis and criticism. Even after the formal end of colonialism, the role of the modern state, itself a vestige of the colonial past, remains a critical target for postcolonial scholars for its elitist and authoritarian tendencies. Within Western academe, the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 is often seen as the start of a postcolonial turn, at least in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. For Said, the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of various degrees of a complex hegemony. Following Said, subaltern critics like Dipesh Chakrabarty (2004), for instance, have examined “the capacities and limitations of certain European social and political categories in conceptualizing political modernity in the context of non-European life-worlds.” By doing so, he questions not only our received understanding of “democracy,” “state,” and “modernity,” but also of academic history writing as an intellectual and political practice. Both are ways of “provincializing Europe” via sustained intellectual dialogues between Europe and its historical Others. These scholars have emphasized not only subaltern agency, but the contexts that facilitate the exercise of such agency in Western and nonWestern contexts. It is this context that Agamben (1998) draws our attention to the unresolved dialectic between constituting power and constituted power which opens the way for a new articulation of the relation between potentiality and actuality. The relation between constituting power and constituted power is just as complicated as the relation Aristotle establishes between potentiality and act, dynamis and energeia. The relation between constituting and constituted power (perhaps like every authentic understanding of the problem of sovereignty) depends on how one thinks the existence and autonomy of potentiality. In the Indian context, an important facet which needs to be thought over is the strategy of counter-hegemony. To begin, lets understand that public expenditure and fiscal measures to help the poor and the distressed have always been a notable component of the state policy, whether declared to be a part of the efforts to attain a socialistic pattern, or presently as restoring livelihoods of those abandoned to destitution because of rapid economic growth. Such being the manoeuvres of ruling power, the politics of adequate opposition needs to combine resistance to all malevolence with critical involvements in public projects. In 324  62/3 ISSN 0975-735X this respect however, political practice of sustained serious engagement in promoting counter-hegemony has remained virtually absent in post-colonial India. The policy followed by the Communist Party of India, in the early 1970s till the electoral defeat of Indira Gandhi after Emergency, of cooperation with the ruling Congress Party was not articulated in mass democratic initiative and mostly reduced to lobbying in the top corridors of power for narrow sectarian advantages. But as we find the ways and means tried out so far, there is very little evidence of critical constructive opposition to effectively counterpoise the manoeuvres of vested interests along so many cunning passages of this ‘passive revolution’ (to be elaborated later) of capital in postcolonial contexts. As far as the development of elites and its implications on power dynamics goes, the post-colonial Indian experience prominently features large pre-capitalist survivals amidst significant capitalist development. With reference to the Indian context, American Political Scientists Rudolph and Rudolph (1987) in their classic In Pursuit of Lakshmi had noted, that in post-Nehruvian India, the State has been forced to respond to ‘demand groups’, including farmers, unionized workers and students. It has indeed done such a ‘governmentalization’ of welfare services albeit through what Bardhan (1984) notes by ‘sharing the spoils. Fast forward to the neo-liberal framework era and here we have urban spaces that are highly contested spaces giving rise to informal settlement and insurgent citizenship. The State’s impetus to bring about institutional reforms in the public sphere might work as a panacea to the stem the differences between various religious and ethnic groups. But, as scholars like Kaviraj (1988) would correctly lament, the State unfortunately has ‘feet of vernacular clay’ and hence as it were, the circuits of civil society which negotiated with such a hybrid State was of two types – one for the elites and the other for the subalterns. The latter is what Chatterjee (2004) would call as ‘political society’. The logic of capital and pre-capital coexisting in an economy endorses the rationale for going with the conceptual division between civil and political society. One needs to discuss at length Partha Chatterjee’s classification of civil and political society to elaborate this strand. This distinction is followed by a characterization of the present balance of India’s class forces as one where the capitalist (elite) class can set the terms of its relationship with other political formations (Chatterjee 2004). In fact, the ongoing experience of nearly three decades has confirmed a distinct place for the Indian bourgeoisie in the neoliberal networks of globalization. Its capacity to achieve opulence and to promise more opulence tends to have wide credibility among middle and upper classes of civil society. Their intellectual pledge to put a premium on the aims of development and modernization along with the promotion of appropriate institutions is now being ranked as the topmost national priority. Chatterjee views all this as evidence of greater bourgeois social hegemony, but with a crucial difference. The persistent presence of a large pre-capitalist sector (a political society) confirms the framework of a pasISSN 0975-735X 2023  325 sive revolution hanging over relations between state and society in India today. We know that capital absorbs fewer toilers than the many displaced in the process of its becoming. Some are then left out and must remain dependent on the means of livelihood available at the site of pre-capital. Thus, with all its prominence, capital still rules without fully superseding pre-capital. There is the crux of a passive revolution. It is marked by the combination of command and quiescence, of active growth and passive survival. Furthermore, the role of governmentality comes to be immensely important for negotiating the cumulative tensions of rapid growth in an economy mixed up with the coexistence of capital and pre-capital. The coexistence is turned to confusion by cumulative disparities between the two sectors. Hence the inherent tendency of capitalist growth not to absorb all those it displaces from their means of livelihood. Such displacements mostly occur as the result of the seizure of lands and other means of livelihood or loss of work due to capitalist competition. Indeed, in developing countries like India, the phenomenon of jobless growth is a major source of differences over the desirability of neoliberal globalization. The differences are accentuated by the need for increasingly capital-intensive technology. It appears that rapid economic growth must be combined with governmental acts of redress in the sphere of political society (comprising peasants, artisans, and petty producers in the informal sector). This is necessary to reverse the effects of primitive capitalist accumulation (Chatterjee 2004) by effective public initiatives for poverty alleviation and programmes to suit the needs of the distressed masses. The priorities of governance in favour of state support for political society should have the consent of civil society. It is necessary to avoid discontent in political society that may upset democratic stability and seriously disturb any course of sound advance. A good way to appraise this necessity is to take account of a few more points that may help as well in understanding the directions of proper political practice. This is the context of Partha Chatterjee’s comment on the need for ameliorative governance to avoid the risk of turning the castaways into “dangerous classes” (Chatterjee 2008: 62). With its intended effects, measures so designed can come as instances of governmentality seeking to sustain bourgeois authority. Indeed, the very idea of only enforcing law and order gives place to an extended view of the state as performing the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which a ruling class maintains its dominance and manages to win the consent of those whom it rules. Also, it is important to recognize how the idea of hegemony with its bearing on new dimensions of state power and its auxiliaries widens the perspectives of any struggle against the status quo, pointing to the means and conditions of creating counter-hegemony. Such issues run through Chatterjee’s reflections on the conditions of peasant action and his considerations about modalities of appeasing the vast masses of political society. Peasants, the agricultural proletariat and the numerous 326  62/3 ISSN 0975-735X laborers toiling in informal units of non-agricultural activities are certainly the most important targets of any government welfare measures to extend bourgeois hegemony. All this indicates the desperate position of no livelihood opportunities for the poor and the marginal toilers in agriculture or elsewhere and the need for public expenditure in their aid. Regular wage earners in capitalist farms do not make a large fraction of India’s agricultural proletariat. Appropriately then, Chatterjee points to the relevance of a Gramscian question about “stages of maturity of the passive revolution of capital” (Chatterjee 2008: 93) and emphasizes the strategic recourse to “a politics of organization” (ibid: 92) of economic units to provide for those deprived of any livelihood from capitalist sources. Such a politics of organization must work with local grassroots initiatives and direction in giving effect to government welfare projects. Therefore, the strategy of counter-hegemony tends to be an engagement of the people in a critical and creative interaction with the project of ruling hegemony. 4. Conclusion : Thus, one may note that a key move required in political sociology is to redefine the scope of the political in two ways – a) by exploring political functions rather than political institutions (i.e., What mechanisms maintain order and stability in the absence of a central state?) and b) by stressing political behaviour, political process, or political performance (i.e., How do actors compete for resources, pursue strategies, jostle for power?). This paper has therefore argued for a distinctive postcolonial approach to the study of power and politics that challenges the dominant ways of producing knowledge about the so-called developing or Third World. It makes us aware of the problems that derive from the neo-Western attempts to identify politics ‘without’ the state. References 1. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2. Bardhan, P. 1984. The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press 3. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 4. Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press 5. _______________. 2008. “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India”, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XLIII No. 16 6. Kaviraj, S. 1988. A critique of the Passive Revolution, Economic and Political Weekly 23(45-7): 2429-44 7. Marx, Karl. 1970. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Peking: Foreign Language Press 8. Rudolph, L.I and Rudolph, S.H. (1987) In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State, Bombay: Orient Longman 9. Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, New Delhi: Routledge 10. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: an outline of interpretative sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press ISSN 0975-735X 2023  327