This episode explores what makes republican values and practices important to the survival of any democracy, as well as the role of sociality in cultivating of a common sense of purpose, mutual interdependence, and collective engagement. What makes the agrarian ethos of Indian village communities resonate with the spirit of democratic republicanism and how does the rural India vote transform political consciousness?
Guests featured in this episode:
Mukulika Banerjee, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she was also the inaugural director of its South Asia Centre from 2015 to 2020. Working at the intersection of social anthropology, politics, and history, Mukulika has published widely on South Asia. She edits also the excellent Routledge series, exploring the political in South Asia. Her most relevant publications to this episode are; Why India Votes [2014] and Cultivating Democracy, Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India.[2021]
Glossary
What is the caste system in India?
(16:15 or p.4 in the transcript)
In South Asia, the caste system has been a dominating aspect of social organization for thousands of years. A caste, generally designated by the term jati (“birth”), refers to a strictly regulated social community into which one is born. Some jatis have occupational names, but the connection between caste and occupational specialization is limited. In general, a person is expected to marry someone within the same jati, follow a particular set of rules for proper behavior (in such matters as kinship, occupation, and diet), and interact with other jatis according to the group’s position in the social hierarchy. In India virtually all nontribal Hindus and many adherents of other faiths (even Muslims, for whom caste is theoretically anathema) recognize their membership in one of the hereditary social communities. Among Hindus, jatis are usually assigned to one of four large caste clusters, called varnas, each of which has a traditional social function: Brahmans (priests), at the top of the social hierarchy, and, in descending prestige, Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (originally peasants but later merchants), and Shudras (artisans and laborers). The particular varna in which a jati is ranked depends in part on its relative level of “impurity,” determined by the group’s traditional contact with any of a number of “pollutants,” including blood, menstrual flow, saliva, dung, leather, dirt, and hair. Intercaste restrictions were established to prevent the relative purity of a particular jati from being corrupted by the pollution of a lower caste. A fifth group, the Panchamas (from Sanskrit panch, “five”), theoretically were excluded from the system because their occupations and ways of life typically brought them in contact with such impurities. They were formerly called the untouchables (because their touch, believed by the upper castes to transmit pollution, was avoided), but the nationalist leader Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi referred to them as Harijan (“Children of God”), a name that for a time gained popular usage. More recently, members of that class have adopted the term Dalit (“Oppressed”) to describe themselves. Officially, such groups are referred to as Scheduled Castes. Those in Scheduled Castes, collectively accounting for roughly one-sixth of India’s total population, are generally landless and perform most of the agricultural labor, as well as a number of ritually polluting caste occupations (e.g., leatherwork, among the Chamars, the largest Scheduled Caste). source
What is a panchayat?
(26:03 or p.7 in the transcript)
Panchayat is the most important adjudicating and licensing agency in the self-government of an Indian caste. There are two types: permanent and impermanent. Literally, a panchayat (from Sanskrit pañca, “five”) consists of five members, but usually there are more; the panchayat has a policy committee, however, often numbering five. The panchayat sits as a court of law. Cases are heard in open meetings in which all members of the caste group concerned are entitled to take part. Any evidence that has any conceivable bearing on the case is admissible; it can be produced by either party, by onlookers, or by members of the council. Types of offenses adjudicated in meetings of the panchayat are breaches of eating, drinking, or smoking restrictions; infractions of marriage rules; breaches of a caste’s customs in feast; breaches of its trade rules; the killing of certain animals, notably cows; and the injury of a Brahman. Less commonly, the panchayat handles criminal and civil cases actionable before a court of law. Panchayats of Muslim castes try only a few of the offenses, as the rest fall under fiqh, or Islāmic law. Penalties take the form of fines (paid by distributing sweets to a caste group or by contributing to a caste fund), the obligation to offer a feast to the berādarī (family brotherhood) or to Brahmans, and temporary or permanent excommunication. Pilgrimage and self-humiliation are sometimes levied, but physical punishment is now uncommon. The passing of the Evidence Act by the British in 1872, with its strict rules of admissible evidence, led to a bypassing of the panchayat by some caste members who began to take their cases directly to the state court (see Indian Evidence Act). Some castes try cases that have come up before a state court or retry them after the verdict of the state court has been given. The Congress Party in India made a point of creating village panchayats as local instruments of government, the so-called panchayat raj, or government by panchayats. source
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Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.
This is the 5th episode of Season 6 of "Democracy in Question." It's my great pleasure to welcome today Mukulika Banerjee, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she was also the inaugural director of its South Asia Centre from 2015 to 2020.
Working at the intersection of social anthropology, politics, and history, Mukulika has published widely on South Asia. She edits also the excellent Routledge series, exploring the political in South Asia. I'm going to mention just two of her books that are relevant to our conversation today. "Why India Votes," 2014, and recently "Cultivating Democracy, Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India."
The last mentioned is a fascinating study of the intertwining of formal, procedural, and institutional aspects of democracy with thick webs of social citizenship in Indian villages. And the argument here is that particular combination, especially these webs of sociality, are the active part of the constitution and cultivation of a sense of collective, collaborative communities of equals. The book is based on 15 years of field research in rural West Bengal. It spans the period in which the hegemony of the Communist Party of India came to be challenged and then replaced by a grassroots populist party which rules the state today.
What makes republican values and practices so important to the survival of any democracy and how do apparently non-political rituals in forms of sociality on the level of a village community contribute to the cultivation of a common sense of purpose, mutual interdependence, and collective engagement? What makes the agrarian ethos of Indian village communities resonate with the spirit of democratic republicanism, and what explains the unusually high electoral participation, especially of underprivileged social groups in India? So, why does rural India vote and how does that vote transform their political consciousness?
Mukulika, a really warm welcome to the podcast and thanks very much for joining me today, it's a great pleasure to have you.
Mukulika Banerjee (MB): Thank you for inviting me.
SR: In your book, you draw some very interesting lessons from rural West Bengal, and your ethnographic fieldwork allows you, of course, a lens on both the formal procedural consolidation of legal institutional architecture, which, of course, safeguards the basic rights of individual citizens, but also look at the substantive deepening of a sense of community, of collective purpose among rural Bengalis. And this is, of course, a lens which is different from that of the political scientist studying democracy in India. So, what are the main lessons that you would draw from your almost two decades of fieldwork in agrarian West Bengal?
MB: So, I think there are two important messages, and each of them can be disaggregated. The first is that democracy needs to be studied at elections and also when there are no elections. Only then can you capture institutional plus social democracy. That is the only way in which you can find out what happens when elections are not happening but what happens in between elections, of course, determines what happens during elections. Both who people are going to vote for or even whether people are going to vote, how they feel about the voting process, how they feel about living a democratic life, what are their expectations of politics and so on. So, electoral plus non-electoral is a critical pillar I think on which democratic democracies should be studied. Anthropology is, like you say, uniquely placed to point this out.
The second thing is, by moving the focus of our study to the agrarian we are doing several things. One is, suddenly, farmers who've been really dismissed by everybody from Karl Marx to contemporary theorists, including Nehru and Ambedkar, who otherwise disagreed on a number of things but on this were fairly united, was the idea of a village of farmers being somehow either famously a sack of potatoes who were unable to create solidarity, that's what Marx's metaphor was about, or that they were always receivers of political ideas that flowed from the center to the local village.
Now, by studying democracy in the village, what we realize actually is that there is something about society at the small scale that allows you to see and learn the mechanisms by which solidarity is created in non-political arenas. Arenas that have nothing to do with formal politics at least. Which feed into what happens in electoral or formal politics. So, the village itself becomes a place where you can examine these things closely. And that's why I use the word "cultivation" in my title. Cultivating democracy works at two registers. One register is the fact that, in order to grow a crop, which is what a lot of farmers do, you need to nurture it, be vigilant about it, you live in hope, you work every single day to make sure that it comes to fruition. You can't just sow a seed and come back six months later to collect your crop, you need to look after it. And these values of vigilance, hope, patience, and nurture, I argue, are also exactly the virtues that you need in order to maintain democracy.
The conclusion really is that farmers are actually, possibly, the best kind of democrats because they understand what cultivation is about. Because, to my mind, the reason why there has been such degeneration of democracy across the globe is because of complacency. We all assume that, if you had set up the right institutions in different national contexts, democracy would simply flourish, that we would continue to harvest its yields year after year as if it did not require us to be active citizens in that process. As if it did not require us to be vigilant about its possible dangers of attacks on it, in a way that a farmer protects his crops. So, cultivation is exactly what we need for democracy, and that is one of the points that I'm making.
SR: Let me just pick up on one point which you just made, which is about acts of solidarity, acts of solidarity as fundamental aspects of democratic self-constitution. And in the book you focus on the ways in which this kind of substantive deepening of a sense of community, of collective purpose ties in to the formal procedural consolidation of a legal institutional architecture, which is also needed to safeguard basic rights of individual citizens vis-à-vis the state. I was wondering, if we move to the focus of your book, to rural West Bengal, what are the main lessons you would like to underline that you have learned through an anthropological study of democracy? In contradistinction, say, to the political scientists. Both of us, as social anthropologists, are familiar with the dictum that anthropologists study in villages but we do not study villages. And many of our colleagues have long given up villages as not only objects of research but also as sites of research. You have consciously chosen, since 15-18 years, to study Indian democracy through the lens of the rural and the lens of the agrarian. That is why I was wondering if you could say something about the main lessons about democracy in everyday life, democracy on the ground, through this particular lens.
MB: As you've said a little while ago, Shalini, that national figures in India showed that socially-disadvantaged citizens of India were more likely to vote than others. And in that same data we also saw that more rural citizens voted than urban, right? This was at the turn of the century, the figures have changed, urban figures have gone up but rural figures have never gone down. The reason why I went to rural India was precisely because we had enthusiastic voting patterns in rural India and I wanted to understand where this was coming from.
As an anthropologist, it became very evident very quickly that you cannot just study enthusiasm for elections during elections only, you have to be there when nothing is happening, when there are no elections happening to see what is going on in social life that creates the kind of appetite and interest in politics and election when they come around. This book and my study is of these two villages when elections happen and also when social life continues without elections.
Now, when we talk about voters, and political scientists talk about voters as people with party affiliations or with commitment to voting or free riding or whatever, we forget that voters are also individuals in the room. A voter is somebody who is a farmer, a mother, a religiously-biased person. There are different other aspects to a voter's life that all go into creating her enthusiasm for voting.
I studied all of these, and what I show is on these extraordinary moments of what I call events - moments of transcendence in economic life, in religious life, in familial kinship life you get these values that are created. So, for instance, when a harvest is brought in. A harvest is a classic act that cannot be achieved by any one individual, it has to be a group activity. And every individual who works in a harvest has to do one particular job and every individual knows that it is that one particular job that they are tasked with that has to be done so that the big harvest is materialized at the end of five days. This value that every person has to do their own bit for a larger good, it's a quintessentially democratic value. But it is not necessarily only created during elections, it is also created, as I show, during a harvest. Or, if you think about the institution of animal sacrifice through Qurbani, one of the eids of Muslim communities. We think from the outside that Qurbani is about eating meat but actually anyone who knows anything about Qurbani will say that when you sacrifice an animal, it really is about giving up your most favorite animal for sacrifice to mimic the Abrahamic sacrifice. It is about giving up something that is very precious, the meat of which is mainly redistributed to everybody in the village. Really, animal sacrifice is about self-denial, it is about redistribution, and it is about the pleasure of consumption knowing that everybody around you also has something to consume. So, you're not consuming at the expense of others. There is a certain collective joy in that consumption.
Now, anyone will recognize these as virtues that we want in the democratic citizen. And so, a village life, a community life at that level shows that these values are created in these non-political spaces.
SR: Mukulika, one point which the book also makes, these non-political periods in between elections is something one could also have studied in urban India. But what you also stress, and let me quote you here, you say, "There is an elective affinity between the values of an agrarian life and republican democracy that is the social imaginaries of agrarian life provide a resource for republican democratic practice." So, could you say something about the republican values which sustain and enact, reenact the democratic ethos through agrarian practices?
MB: Sure. So, here it's vital to understand the importance of how cultivation works on the one hand, which is what a farmer is about, and on the other hand of republican politics where the idea of active citizenship is very important. From Aristotle's writings down to the earlier Machiavelli down much later into the 19th and 20th century, this stream of thinking about politics and citizenship is that a citizen is not one who elects their leaders and then, you know, sits on their hands for the next five years, it is a person who is actively engaged in being political every single day of their life, it is about staying well-informed, it is about establishing facts and learning what is happening, it is calling into question, it is being unafraid to ask elected representatives questions about their performance so that at no point does it become a hiatus between elections that everybody goes away and you just expect democracy to happen. Democracy has to be actively brought into being through the act of citizenship of citizens.
Cultivation is a little bit like that. You don't just plant the seed and come back five years later to harvest a crop, or six months later to harvest a crop, you have to be there every single day nurturing, watering, watching, being vigilant about a hail storm or insects. You are noticing things that nobody else notices because you know that crop and care about that crop because your life depends on it. So, farmers are able to remind us what cultivation teaches us about the nature of being an active citizen. And this is why I say that, quite contrary to popular perception, whether it is Karl Marx or whether it is Nehru and Ambedkar in India, farmers and the agrarian as a setting, may actually have something to teach us about the nature of democratic practice. The village becomes a place where democratic theory is understood and taken forward rather than being just a recipient of ideas that come from urban spaces, that there is something about rural life. That, despite, on the one hand, deep social divisions of caste and class and gender and so on that it is possible for the community to come together in rare moments, they are rare but they do happen, where you are able to transcend differences to create a common purpose. And these are the moments that feed into democratic life.
SR: The conceptual framework, Mukulika, that guides your approach is the foundational duality, if you like, of postcolonial, post-independence India. It's both a democracy and a republic. You referred just now to Ambedkar and you refer in the book also to Ambedkar's insistence during the drafting of the Indian constitution that both republic and democratic be explicitly mentioned in the constitution. And I think this is because he's painfully aware of the, essentially, hierarchical nature of Indian society as not a very democratic society in its ethos, surely. And it's because of that Ambedkar viewed democratic institutions above all elections as necessary but not sufficient conditions for a fair and just society. So, he's echoing John Dewey's ideas about the need for a wider and deeper culture of democracy and stresses the need for a genuine republican spirit which creates lasting bonds and horizontal ties among free and equal citizens.
Now, when you were doing your ethnographic fieldwork you were, obviously, looking at the significance of this duality of the formal, and the substantive, the political, and the social facets of democracy which play such a central role. But could you give us some examples of how in the rural setting boundaries of caste, class, religion are transcended?
MB: It always strikes me, Shalini, that, when we talk about rural India in any discussion, and I think Ambedkar has a lot to do with this, but it has continued in contemporary India. It particularly came to a force during the lockdown, which was announced in India at four hours notice, and all the migrant labor that had come from rural India into urban India was left high and dry, they literally had to walk back, you will remember this, along the highways. And the whole public discussion was, "Why on Earth are they going back?", because villages are these dens of vice, as Ambedkar had called them, they are ridden by caste, there is inequality. And it struck me as very interesting because our assumption almost was as if urban India does not have caste. At a time when cities in India are becoming increasingly ghettoized by religion, by caste, by what you eat. You can't buy property, you can't move into an apartment in a building if you're a non-vegetarian in a vegetarian building, and so on. So, open spaces in India are extremely stratified in a way that has rapidly happened in the last few years.
But rural India too, in the same way, caste is the complete curse of Indian society, it's a complete opposite of fraternity and solidarity. The point that I was making was that, in the village, there are moments when you're required to subsume divisions of caste and class and come together. And those moments...just like the polling booths, right? So, the polling booth is an interesting space in India, it's unlike any other space in India because it is the only space where there is genuine social mixing. So, in a polling booth, you can't say to a low-caste person who's standing in front of you, "I'm not going to stand behind you," or, "you are low-caste, please, go to the back of the queue," or, "get out of the way," you simply can't. And that is what makes a polling booth unique. And these extraordinary moments, like certain religious moments, like the division of the harvest, or the work of bringing the harvest together, are these brief but hugely potent moments in which social differences are erased.
And this is one of the reasons why, going back to what you were saying about Ambedkar and the Constitution, he did say that India is a non-democratic soil, it's a top dressing on a deeply undemocratic soil to introduce democracy. But he also said one of the defenses precisely of universal adult franchise was that the experience of voting in elections was also going to provide a momentary but lasting glimpse of what political equality felt like. And he was absolutely right on that because you talk to voters in India and they say, "Yes, we live in a very unequal society but I love to vote because, when I go to vote, I feel totally equal to everybody else and I emerge from that polling booth feeling a little bit taller, walking a little bit straighter because I know that I am the same as everyone else." This is a big deal if you belong to a socially-disadvantaged group.
SR: You're right on this because most Indian villagers, especially the poor and the lower-caste, not only attend election rallies but almost 80% have consistently voted at all elections, local, regional, national. India would be the best counter example, in a way, to the European trends in declining of voter turnout, especially declining voter turnout among the underprivileged or marginalized groups in Europe, which are de-politicized. Now, paradoxically, however, the two questions, Mukulika, that you raise in the book you answered in the negative, you ask, "Did this democratic upsurge create a better democratic culture in India? And was this democratic upsurge successful in creating democratic spaces within political parties?" And so, it seems as if you're making an argument, yes, there was enormous enthusiasm for a participation in elections but there was little genuine widening of political representation, is that the argument?
MB: Yes, I think, if you look at a state like Uttar Pradesh, for instance, where one of the biggest upsurges of what we call the Other Backward Class, there was a low-caste assertion of these caste groups in the electoral sphere. You suddenly had a woman belonging to an ex-untouchable community who was the chief minister of the largest and most popular state in India. It was extraordinary, it was an extraordinary reversal of the caste hierarchy in India. But what it did not lead to was a greater representation and space for Dalits in political life through her party, or indeed in others, it did not ensure that the horribly skewed statistics that we have in all our public institutions and private institutions, in education across the corporate world, in the army, literally any profession you can think of, is dominated by the tiny minority of upper-caste Indians across the country, unless that kind of redressal can happen. The redressal of that balance is what would result in a more genuinely democratic culture. And that kind of inclusion of not only vast members of the population but also previously underprivileged members of the population getting equal opportunities to enter political life, to enter public life, to enter salary jobs doesn't happen, we would see this as a failure. So, the point was simply this, that, yes, a lot of political parties came up representing these caste interests. But whether this led to a widening of representatives from these different castes is a wide open question.
SR: So, this is an interesting discussion between Gandhi on the one hand and Nehru and Ambedkar on the other. Gandhi advocated a pluralist mode of decentralizing power, he wanted to prioritize local village community as opposed to representative democracy of the British Westminster model. This was an idea which was strongly rejected both by Nehru and by Ambedkar who considered village life to be caste-based, violent, exploitative, and a world of conflicting particularisms, which could never function as the foundation of a new democratic republic.
Now, your book makes a case for the democratizing potential of village life. You don't reject the Ambedkar/Nehru position on the role of political institutions. And you sum it up, and let me quote you here, you say, "It was inculcating the belief in the very possibility of a more egalitarian and just world, that was the hardest challenge that democratic politics faced in India." So, could you say something about how the pedagogy of an active citizenship is cultivated, reenacted outside of the kinds of rituals that you have described?
MB: Yes, it's interesting that India's remarkable constitution, because of this lack of faith in the local by Ambedkar and by Nehru and others of that kind of thinking did not devolve government to the village, to the local, to communities at all, it was brought in the third tier of democracy, as we know it now, of local elections in panchayats and rural areas had to be brought in through the 73rd and 74th amendments decades after India's constitution was written. And we have, as scholars, paid very little attention to how politics is done at that level, what is happening at the local, how do people engage politically at the local level.
One thing is for sure that, while we talk about the Westminster model, it is very difficult both to be an MP and to aspire to active citizenship in a parliamentary constituency in India. An Indian parliamentary constituency is 20 times the size of a UK parliamentary constituency. India is the most populous country in the world today, and yet there are more MPs in the House of Commons than in India's Lok Sabha. So, clearly, every MP is having to represent an impossibly large number of people.
And from the other end, if you're a citizen who wants to hold your MP to account, he or she is impossibly distant to figure, often that's why in India you ask people the name of their local MP and they might not be able to tell you. But they will be able to tell you who your local pradhan is at the local government or who the local councilor is in cities because they are more proximate, they are people who are seen, who are known, who can form that relationship with voters.
So, this initial hesitancy about devolving power to the local has really cost India dearly because it is only now that we are in our third, fourth cycles of panchayat elections in different parts of rural India, they were brought in at different stages across India. And the way people interact with these local bodies is going to tell us a lot more, I think, about the nature of active citizenship and how people interact with these institutions. Certainly in my own village it so happened that the panchayat for the 10 villages was located in one of the villages that I studied. And he felt he had to be answerable on a daily basis to the people around him.
And that is what we mean by democratic culture in between elections. Right? We want elected representatives to feel the heat of accountability on a daily basis. And at the local level, that is possible. It is almost impossible to achieve that at the regional level or at the national level.
SR: So, let me bring our conversation to a close by asking you to talk a little bit about the failures of the Left Front which led a coalition of the Communist Party and other left parties in West Bengal, introduced many egalitarian reforms, including land redistribution, which was crucial to the development of a self-conscious ethos of democratic participation. And this seems to be irreversible. But you've also detailed in your work many of the flaws of this socialist experiment from the monopoly of political power tainted by corruption or the use of repressive means and intimidation to create special economic zones in the mid 2000s when protests by farmers against expropriation of land and forced displacements were met with violent repression by the state.
So, there's been a gradual disenchantment with the left politics on the part of the electorate in the area where you have been working for so long to be replaced by a kind of populist politics which is thriving on what?
MB: So, Mamata Banerjee, who is the chief minister of West Bengal, won her third term in 2021. And there are two or three reasons people give you why she has continued to remain in power and why people continue to vote for her. One is that she has taken welfare to the doorstep, Duare Sarkar, the government has come to people's doorstep because she has guaranteed that, from cradle to grave, the state is going to make sure that people are supported. And in a place like India where the safety net is so full of holes, this has meant a lot to the population.
The second big reason, in 2021, was also that the BJP, which has not had much of a presence in West Bengal but does, of course, lead the national government, wanted to win power in West Bengal, it's one of the biggest states in India, and polarized the community and the discourse and the campaign. And so, Mamata's ability to manage a state with a 25% - a quarter of West Bengal's population is Muslim - on a more even keel as the preferred option.
But when she first came to power it was really because she showed up the hubris of the Left Front, which by the end was bizarrely turning against its most steady votebank, its supporters of the rural proletariat, and taking away land, cultivable land, to build car factories on. And this was the absolute culmination of the hubris of the Left Front, which had grown over 34 years, where increasingly the Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India, Marxist, was built on complacency of support of rural agrarian workers. So, farm workers, sharecroppers, these were the majority of the voters for the Left Front.
This was a very valuable support they had. The Left Front was in power for 34 years, this is the longest elected communist government anywhere in the world. And those elections were elections, they were not stolen in any way. But it got to the stage where this Left Front hegemony was maintained through a comrade pretty much in every village where they took over not just elections but every aspect of society. They wanted to control what people ate, who they married, what kind of festivals they had, and so on. It was a complete capture of not just political institutions but all social institutions. And people pushed back against that.
In fact, one of the things my book shows is how, when there is such an oppressive hegemonic political presence of a single political party, how do you begin to even think about political opposition where people are so terrorized? You know, the word in Bengali is shantarash, which is terror. People were so traumatized and so terrified of how politics worked that they wouldn't talk to me about politics when I first started my research in the 90s. And you see how people are able to push back using both electoral and other means in getting rid of such a hegemonic party.
And this is the story that has been told by me and others, but I think what we forget in this and what we must not forget is the legacy of the Left Front and the communist parties. The criticisms are all valid but we have to recognize that this party, these collection of parties gave manual work and labor dignity in a way that was unprecedented. And so, the reason why they were rewarded again and again for 34 years in those elections by people voting for them was because, through very economical means, they actually did not do as much as they could've done, should've done in terms of land reforms. They never reformed the agrarian markets, and so on. But what they did do was raise the daily wage for manual work and they gave people dignity.
And in a deeply stratified society like India where, if you belong to a low-caste means that you work with your hands, that your idea of your only ticket to elitism is actually white-collar work, that you're removed from manual work. In that kind of scenario, to say that workers had dignity and they're going to be paid for their work in fair terms was radical, that was revolutionary. And that is why they stayed.
So, it's a mixed bag, the legacy of the Left Front. This is an irreversible change, and dignity of labor, therefore, in West Bengal is not going to slide back into what it used to be before the Left Front easily but it also has created a certain politicization of social life.
SR: And yet, you have a rather bleak diagnosis of party politics in West Bengal, which points to a general erosion of democratic norms. When you say that the party Trinamool which has replaced the Left Front, in a sense, cynically reproduces the old grammar of politics by replicating not only structures of authoritarian power but also deep anti-democratic sentiments.
MB: That's right. It's when you do politics through the use of violence that communist politics has done in Bengal, and Kerala, elsewhere too, the legacy also, unfortunately, becomes a legacy of the use of violence to settle democratic disputes. And this is exactly what democracy should not be about, it should be about deliberation and about accommodation and coming to some sort of solution. Without the use of violence, it's meant to be a peaceful transfer of power. That is, at the top there is a peaceful transfer of power, and Mamata Banerjee comes in as chief minister in place of the Left Front chief minister. But what you get on the ground, at the village level, is new comrades emerging who feel it is their time in the sun to take their revenge on all those Left Front comrades from the past. And this has been a complete failure.
And I think the problem of violence in Indian politics needs to be thought through much much more carefully and we must pay more attention to it. Kerala, a state that we always celebrate for its high figures of literacy, it's high ranking in the human-development indicators, and so on, if you actually read any account of Kerala politics, the amount of blood that is shed on an everyday basis because of clashes, as they're called, between political party workers is astonishing. And, in a weird way, we've normalized this high incidence of violence in Indian politics as if somehow it is an unintended consequence rather than very logic on which political competition is somehow built. And, as, I think, scholars of democracy, we need to think about these agonisms and why the agonistic electoral politics is so entwined with bloodletting and violence.
While, on the other hand, the sort of reparative republican active citizenship that happens in between elections has the potential for compromise, for decision making, for self-governance. These two strands that make up Indian politics, one exemplified by the word democracy, i.e. political democracy, i.e. elections, agonisms, violence. And the word republic on the other hand, which is much more about solidarity, about repair, about bringing people together. These two strands coexist and run alongside each other. And sometimes I think the real problems happen when the democratic strand, the one of political democracy, overrides the strand of a more social and economic democracy, as Ambedkar called it, the one exemplified by the republic.
SR: So, thank you, Mukulika, for this really insightful analysis looking back at your intensive ethnographic research of decades into the ways in which agrarian politics, agrarian life are intertwined with the democratic ethos in Indian villages. Thanks very much for being with me today.
MB: Thank you.
SR: So, let me sum up this conversation with Mukulika. We've heard a nuanced analysis of India as both a republic and a democracy. We learned why it's important to distinguish between formal and substantive aspects of democracy, what Ram Guha has called "the hardware and software of democracy" and why both of these aspects are crucial for the functioning of liberal democratic institutions, as well as the cultivation of democracy in everyday life.
Interestingly, it's the non-political rituals and forms of sociality in village communities that contribute to the cultivation of a sense of common purpose, collective engagement, mutual interdependence despite deep divisions of caste and religion. It's these complex social processes that explain the enthusiasm for democracy in rural India where voter turnouts in local, regional, and national elections are astonishingly high, especially as compared to many a western democracy. It's 800 million voters who have been casting their ballots in Indian elections, rural voters much more often and enthusiastically than their urban counterparts. There is a high trust in the electoral system which leads to this enthusiasm for voting. But surprisingly, there has been a worry about the decline, the erosion of this trust.
Politics, Mukulika has argued, should be viewed as a collective project rather than reduced to the agonistic logic of electoral competition. The formal procedural consolidation of a legal institutional architecture safeguards the basic rights of individual citizens but it's a substantive sense of community, of collective purpose that deepens democratic practices. This idea that goes back to John Dewey was also stressed by Ambedkar, one of the main authors of the Indian constitution, when he pointed to the need for a genuine republican spirit which creates lasting bonds of commonality and horizontal ties among free and equal citizens.
Ambedkar knew well that political democracy, that is institutions and elections, were only a formal framework for realizing the ideals of social and economic democracy, which had to be constantly recreated through collective acts of imagination but also of regular repeated practice on the ground by citizens. It's in this sense that democracy needs patient constant nurture and vigilance. It's like cultivating crops in a field. And it is in this sense that democracy needs cultivation by individual citizens, not only in India but in every society, through active citizenship.
This was the 5th episode of Season 6. Thank you very much for listening and join us again for the next episode in two weeks time. I will be talking then with Sergei Guriev at Sciences Po in Paris about the political economy of illiberalism and the rise of, what he has called, spin dictators. Please go back and listen to any of the episodes you might have missed. And of course let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.