Published in Ajay Gudavarthy (ed), 2011, Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society, London: Anthem Press

Political Society in a Capitalist Worldi

Swagato Sarkar1

Partha Chatterjee is one of the very few scholars in India who have systematically

tried to theorize the specificity of Indian democratic politics. His conceptualization of

political society can be seen as an approach to explicate the latter’s logics. This

conceptualization has been modified and refined over the years by mediating on the

concrete historical experience of a postcolonial country and through a critical

engagement with the received Western normative political theory. In this paper, first, I

will provide a sketch of Chatterjee’s criticism of the concept of civil society, and then

present a critical review of his concept of political society. I will focus on the three

tension-ridden components of his project: the defence of a communal way of life,

mapping the differentiated political space, and a suspicion towards constitutionalism,

and thereafter, provide an alternative normative framework. I will argue, against

Chatterjee, that the concept of political society does not denote a positive political

development, i.e. does not present a possibility for ‘substantially redefining property

and law’ in favour of subaltern people/classes or ‘actual expansion of the freedoms of

the people’; rather it should be used to provide a critical insight into Indian politics,

particularly in relation to the process of capitalist expansion and differentiation.

CHATTERJEE’S CRITIQUE OF CIVIL SOCIETY

It is well known that the discussion on political society is embedded in the debate on

civil society and the critique of the conceptual infrastructure of Western normative

theory. In this debate, normatively, civil society has been identified as a domain for

the expansion and realization of rights and freedom (Cohen and Arato 1992), and

instrumentally, it is seen as a domain where the distribution, exercise and control of

1 Dr. Swagato Sarkar obtained his DPhil [PhD] from the University of Oxford, U.K. in 2009. He is the Assistant Dean (Academic Programme) and Associate Professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, Sonipat, Delhi NCR, India. Email: swagato.sarkar@gmail.com

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power are (democratically) contested (Nonan-Ferrell 2004). Taken together, civil

society is an integral part of democracy and a placeholder of institutions.

I will argue that Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Western normative theory and civil

society is primarily a critique of the subject (i.e. citizen) that this theory supposes. His

critique draws attention to the interpellative structure and the criteria of membership

of the institutions proposed/assumed by this theory, namely, the erasure of difference

in favour of formal equality and freedom (Chatterjee 2004). The effect of this formal

interpellation is that the state in its conduct can recognize or favour citizens only as

unencumbered individuals, severed of any primordial ties – a product of Western

humanism and secularism. Since the primordial identities of the citizens are not

invoked or referred to, hence, they are rendered homogeneous before the state,

namely, as a nation. It is the will of the citizens, expressed as their generalized

political aspiration and popular sovereignty, which gives legitimacy to the state and

forms the basis of democracy.

Here, Chatterjee posits the concrete postcolonial context against the normative

concept of civil society, and argues that only a handful of the ‘elites’ in post-colonial

countries can meet such a criterion of citizenship. These elites are the product of

inherited modernity (from colonialism), who can meet the demand of being

unencumbered either because they are cultured/socialized into such a being, or can

simply afford to ignore/avoid their primordial identities. Hence, the scope of the

concept of civil society is restrictive. This (normative) theoretical position is also

problematic because the concept of ‘community’, which provides meaning to most of

the people in these countries, is suppressed and relegated to the pre-modern historical

time (Chatterjee 1998 and 2004). Therefore, civil society is a limited normative

concept and an undifferentiated space.

Put differently, Western normative theory finds only a section of the postcolonial

society as the true bearer of modernity. One can note that, by foregrounding

communal being (and identity), Chatterjee differentiates ‘community’ from civil

society in an ontological way, i.e. a way of life based on a shared kinship (see below),

rather than a contractual (and formal) associational life in civil society. He proposes to

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split the political space, and to conceptualize a domain, separate and distinct from

civil society, i.e. political society.

Thus, there are three issues which are at stake here: (i) the difference in ontology

(/particular ways of life), (ii) the differentiation of political space, and (iii) the

significance of formal and normative concepts vis-à-vis empirical context. Chatterjee

tries to engage with these three issues to provide a theory of political society which

will demonstrate the democratic urge and the expansion of freedom of the members of

political society (i.e. subalterns) in India and other postcolonial countries. In other

words, he attempts to develop a normative theory of (populist) democracy based on

the experience of postcolonial countries like India.

CHATTERJEE ON POLITICAL SOCIETY

Chatterjee’s advocacy for the identification of a different political space beyond civil

society rests on three moves. First, he focuses attention on the sphere of governmental

interventions where, he claims, a different kind of political engagement between the

legal-bureaucratic apparatus and the people who are excluded from civil society can

be witnessed.

The post-colonial Indian state inherited the legal-bureaucratic apparatus, which is able

“to reach as the target of many of its activities virtually all of the population that

inhabits its territory, [whereas] the domain of civil social institutions, [….] is still

restricted to a fairly small section of ‘citizens’” (Chatterjee 2001, 172). According to

Chatterjee, this is a new paradigm, and there is a clear shift from the abstract

theoretical domain of citizenship to the actual domain of (public) policy. Following

Foucault, he claims that the domain of policy is predicated upon a conception of the

society as one constituted by population, not citizens or “elementary units of

homogenous families” (Chatterjee 1998, 279; 2001, 173). “The regime secures

legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in the matters of state, but by claiming

to provide for the well-being of the population” (Chatterjee 1998, 279). Thus,

Chatterjee’s first move shifts the focus of political theory from the normative category

of ‘citizen’ to the descriptive and empirical category of ‘population.’

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The concept of population is predicated upon an enumerable, descriptive, and

empirical ‘mass’ of people, and does not rely on a normative theory or abstraction.

The population is “assumed to contain, large elements of ‘naturalness’ and

‘primordiality’; the internal principles of the constitution of particular population

groups is not expected to be rationally explicable since they are not the products of

rational contractual association, but are, as it were, pre-rational” (Chatterjee 2001, 173

and passim). The concept of population offers the governmental functions and

apparatus an access to “a set of rationally manipulable instruments for reaching [a]

large section of the inhabitants of a country as the targets of ‘policy’.”

Chatterjee makes the second move by arguing that such interventions in the society-

as-population, if we may call it, and the interaction between these governmental

apparatus and the population groups inaugurate a new site for strategic manoeuvring,

resistance and appropriation. Chatterjee calls this site political society. The strategic

manoeuvre and mobilization that take place in this domain neither always conform,

nor are consistent with, the principles of association in civil society – they often result

in the transgression of law. Yet, Chatterjee identifies an ‘urge for democracy’ in this

mobilization in political society, as it channels the demands on the developmental

state – the state that looks after its people and provides benefits. Therefore, the subject

at this stage of his argument is a ‘subject of development’.

The third move is made by translating the ‘subject of development’ into a ‘political

subject’, by assigning an identity to it and finding a normative ground for it.

Chatterjee is interested in exploring how people use the space opened by the

intervention of governmental functions. As we have seen, such interventions perceive

the society as population and then categorize the latter into empirical groups which

become the ‘target’ for policies. However, such categorization also infuses a new

identity within the group, and many a time, the constituents of the group emerge as

distinct political entities. These new groups have a territorial boundary, “clearly

defined in time and space” (Chatterjee 2004, 58 and passim). Consistent with his

critique of civil society and the foregrounding of community, Chatterjee tries to

demonstrate how these groups become a ‘community’ – and thus a collective, and

also finds a normative ground for the latter’s demands. According to him, since the

livelihood and existence of many of the members of such groups are predicated upon

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a (collective) violation of (property) laws, they appear as ‘illegal entities’ before the

state. They are not recognized as proper civic bodies, pursing legitimate objectives.

Thus, to be recognized by the governmental functions, they must “find ways of

investing their collective identity with a moral content” (ibid 57 and passim) and

thereby “give to the empirical form of a population group the moral attributes of a

community” [emphasis in original]. Yet this community is about “the shared interests

of the members of association... they describe the community in […] terms of a shared

kinship…the most common metaphor… is that of a family.”

Chatterjee never spells out what he means by the ‘moral content’ of an identity, but it

seems that these new groups appropriate the proposition of the “government’s

obligation to look after the poor and underprivileged population groups” (Chatterjee

2004, 60). The objective of their mobilization is to “secure the benefits of

governmental program[me]s” (Chatterjee 2004, 66), which they claim as “a matter of

rights and use their association as the principal collective instrument to pursue that

claim” (ibid 59). This, according to Chatterjee, is a clear break with the erstwhile

patron-client exchanges, and an indication of their political assertion.

Chatterjee explains that the mobilization which takes place on the terrain of political

society is “necessarily temporary and contextual”, and “depends entirely on the ability

of particular population groups to mobilize support to influence the implementation of

government policy in their favour” (Chatterjee 2004, 60, emphasis added. Note:

implementation, not policy formulation, as he has already mentioned, “The regime

secures legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in the matters of state, but by

claiming to provide for the well-being of the population” (Chatterjee 1998, 279)).

Such strategic politics must operate within the constellation of the (mainstream)

political formations (i.e., parties, but also non-governmental organizations?). The

success of such strategic manoeuvring depends on “applying the right pressure at the

right places in the governmental machinery” (Chatterjee 2004, 66). However, they do

not always have access to such ‘right places’, and therefore, “(t)o produce a viable

and persuasive politics of the governed, there has to be considerable act of mediation”

(ibid 64). Hence, there is a real need for finding trustworthy mediators who can

represent them.

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It is through such political engagements that people are “substantial[ly] redefin[ing]

property and law within the actually existing modern state” (Chatterjee 2004, 75) and

“are devising new ways in which they can choose how they should be governed...

people are learning, and forcing their governors to learn, how they would prefer to be

governed…[which itself is a] good justification for democracy” (ibid 77-78).

A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF POLITICAL SOCIETY

As mentioned earlier, Chatterjee’s critique of civil society is predicated on the critique

of the subject that Western normative theory supposes. Furthermore, his

conceptualization of political society is predicated on the difference in the modes of

“transacting business with the constitutional state” (Chatterjee 1998, 282). The

modality of realization of rights is what, then, separates political society from civil

society. The difference in ontology which Chatterjee introduced at the beginning of

his critique of civil society – by foregrounding the lived experience of a ‘communal’

being, as opposed to the associational life of the unencumbered modern individuals in

civil society – is replaced with a critical appraisal of the procedural dimension of

Indian democracy (involved in ‘transacting business’, as quoted above). Even though

‘community’ is invoked in the discursive construction of the political subject, the

successful manoeuvring (including para-legal negotiations and transgression and

suspension of law) in political society is not dependent on that invocation; rather it is

dependent on the ‘majoritarian bias’ as we shall later see. In sum, the communal-

associational difference becomes untenable or insignificant as Chatterjee carries

forward his argument. While trying to explore the ontology of this later position, we

do not find any elaboration of the concept of the social. Rather, Chatterjee reads social

relationships and practices “in relation to the legal-political forms of the modern

state” (Chatterjee 2004, 74). He neither engages with the immanent antagonisms in

the social, nor with the quasi-transcendental conditions of possibility and

impossibility of political actions/interventions. To modify my last observation, I can

say that, at the ontological level, Chatterjee posits the difference between political

society and civil society in terms of the difference in the legal status of the entities

that the state encounters, and the contestation and negotiations which take place over

law, rules and norms become the focus of his analysis. It is therefore no surprise to

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see that the procedural dimension unfolds in terms of judging the legal status of the

means of the chosen economic activity by, and amenities for physical living of, the

members of political society. Political action is seen in terms of establishing the legal,

or transgressing the illegal, status within the black letter (property) law (which

becomes a referent point). Political space, then, is strictly the space of interaction

between the state and the ‘population’. Obviously, Chatterjee sees this in a positive

light.

Chatterjee argues that as the new political entities wrangle over property and benefits,

they also strike at the foundation of property relations. Property, Chatterjee reminds

us, is “the conceptual name of regulations by law of relations between individuals in

civil society” (Chatterjee 2004, 74 and passim). But as these “social relations” are yet

to be “mo[u]lded into proper forms of civil society, the state must maintain a fiction

that in the constitution of its sovereignty, all citizens belong to civil society and are,

by virtue of that legally constructed fact, equal subjects of the law.” This ‘fictional’

element must be addressed in the actual administrative processes.

The postcolonial (Indian) state not only finds a different legal entity/subject, but also

negotiates with it, instead of liquidating or banishing it. According to Chatterjee, this

negotiation does not take place because of the state’s benevolence; rather these

subjects force the state to do so. Therefore, a positive appraisal of political society is

pivoted on demonstrating the agency of the people in forcing the state to recognize

them. The normative dimension of political society becomes visible in terms of

delineating alternative (even if contingent) criteria for the recognition by the state.

The governmental functions and non-governmental agencies are forced to recognize

the ‘demands’ of the members of political society in a different way. Since, these

agencies do not recognize these members or groups as part of civil society, so they

cannot negotiate with them according to the formal and strict procedures and law of

the land, i.e. the so-called autonomy of the state is not obtained here. Hence, there is a

proliferation of layered mediations and para-legal arrangements to resolve various

contentious issues, and to meet the demands of these groups. The governmental

bodies and political representatives deliberate and negotiate to identify the valid

claims (Chatterjee 2004, 69). However, such negotiations must be hidden and not

formally recorded, as “(i)t is entirely possible that the negotiations on the ground did

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not respect the principles of bureaucratic rationality or even the provisions of law”

(ibid 73). Chatterjee appreciates this ‘para-legal arrangement’ and the actions in

political society as an act of “actual expansion of the freedoms of the people” (ibid, 66

and passim). Chatterjee argues that certain groups participate in political process

through manoeuvring in political society, which is otherwise not possible within the

liberal space of the associations of civil societyii. He claims that the transactions in

political society open up the possibility to “effectively work against the [existing]

distribution of power in society as a whole” (emphasis in original). This possibility,

according to him, is realized through the distribution of property rights. He briefly

refers to Amartya Sen’s capability approach, which “embod[ies] a set of substantive

freedoms rather than utilities or income or primary goods” (ibid 68) to support his

claim.

However, there is a limit to this ‘agency argument’, which also indicates the limit of

political society. First, there is a problem of scale. The very fact that (successful)

negotiations and the modalities of realization of rights in political society are

contingent and specific to a locale – the terminal stage of application of power,

therefore the methodology (mostly ethnographic case-studies) can enlighten us about

micro- and capillary- politics, but not about the macro processes. It will be difficult to

induce a general condition of freedom from such micro-political events even though it

affirms the liberal political theory which posits an agent (here, the ‘governeds’) who

experiences freedom, both in the negative and positive ways, but it does not

problematize the actual scale or type of the structural conditions. But, since Chatterjee

chooses to focus on property relationships and welfare benefits, therefore the

structural conditions which make capitalist expansion possible and to what extent the

members of political society can negotiate within capitalism and expand their freedom

are at stake here. Second, Chatterjee observes that the leverage in political society is

linked with the “inherent majoritarian bias of electoral democracy” (Chatterjee 2008b,

90 and passim). Because of this bias, certain sections of the population are excluded

from political society, producing newly marginalized groups, comprising of low-caste

and adivasi people. “Political society and electoral democracy have not given these

groups the means to make effective claims on governmentality. In this sense, these

marginalized groups represent an outside beyond the boundaries of political

societyiii.” This third space (after civil and political societies) is a new category in

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Chatterjee’s writing, which John and Deshpande (2008, 85) call the “liminal zone.”

Two points are to be noted here: first, the project (of political geography) to delineate

and exhaustively map the differentiated political space is under threat as we

continuously need to conceive new categories to capture this spatial differentiation

exhaustively – there is always a space which remains outside (here, ‘liminal zone’).

Second, the possibility of negotiation and transgression of law with impunity is

perhaps linked to this ‘majoritarian bias’ and the related capacity to form nexus by

both the elite and subaltern. As I mentioned earlier, the successful manoeuvring in

political society is not dependent on the communal way of life; if it were so, then the

stronger communal life of adivasi people would have secured them a place in political

society. Therefore, we need to question Chatterjee’s ‘communitarian’ and

postmodernist (/post-Marxist?) suspicion towards law and constitutionalism, and

argue that law, rules and norms can be both emancipatory and repressive and

disciplinary. In other words, the transgression of law and contingent para-legal

negotiations cannot solely secure the emancipatory possibility (i.e. actual expansion

of freedom) for the members of political society as Chatterjee argues. In the next

section I will elaborate and dwell upon these critical issues.

POLITICAL SOCIETY AS CRITIQUE

Now, it is pertinent to ask why Chatterjee theorizes political society in a statist/state-

centric and legalistic way. It might be helpful to refer to the original concept of

governmentality to understand that impulse. In developing the concept of political

society, particularly in terms of ‘the politics of the governed’, Chatterjee selectively

draws from the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. Governmentality, as we

know, denotes the generalized governmental rationality, beyond that of the state.

Methodologically, it studies the strategic field of application of power, whose

problematic is: “[H]ow best to govern[?]” (O’Malley et al 1997, 502).

Governmentality is about the organization of resources and institutions, establishment

of norms and practices, etc., and justifying this constellation. Thereby, as we know,

power assumes a productive dimension, rather than a negative and repressive one.

Thomas Lemke argues that the salient feature of Foucault’s conceptualization of

governmentality is that it “links technologies of the self with technologies of

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domination, the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state; and finally, it

helps to differentiate between power and domination” (Lemke 2002, 51).

Government refers to more or less systematized, regulated and reflected modes

of power (a “technology”) that go beyond the spontaneous exercise of power

over others, following a specific form of reasoning (a “rationality”) which

defines the telos of action or the adequate means to achieve it” (Lemke 2002,

53).

And thereby, “structuring and shaping the field of possible action of subjects” (ibid

52).

In Chatterjee’s conceptualization of political society and the case-studies that he

engages with, we never see the inter-linkage between the ‘technologies of the self’

and ‘technologies of domination’. What comes out, as mentioned earlier, is that the

process of surveying and categorization (which are not exactly the ‘technologies of

domination’) of the population are politicized, i.e. people use the very categories,

which are generated or used in surveys and censuses (which again are not exactly the

‘technologies of the self’), to stake claims on the state. Read this way, Chatterjee’s

notion of ‘governed’ as a subject of political society is nominal, and the process of

‘subjection to power’ in the domain of governmental/public policy – which is the

premise of Chatterjee’s argument – does not end up in producing/constructing any

subjectivity as such. And this happens, because governmentality is played out in India

exclusively within the body politic of the state, not beyond the latteriv. This statement

of mine might seem to be contradictory to Chatterjee’s (2008b, 93) later claim that

“governmental power [..] is no longer restricted to the branches of the state[,] but

extends to a host of non-state and even non-governmental agencies.” Chatterjee does

not define ‘governmental power’ explicitly; however, it is evident that he sees

‘governmental power’ to be beyond the state from the stand point of the institutional

space of application of power, but not from the problematic of ‘subject’,

‘subjectivity’v and rationality.

In Chatterjee’s writings, ‘governmentality’ is just an alternative way to understand the

interaction of the Indian state with the population, and does not refer to the

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generalized ‘governmental rationality’ or ‘logics’ – perhaps, that itself points to the

postcolonial predicament. A lack of mediation on this predicament makes political

society a theory of politicsvi – describing the modes of transaction between the state

and ‘governeds’. A description of the social conditions in which the ‘governeds’ find

themselves does not elucidate or clarify the ontology of the social, from which the

specificity of the postcolonial condition (and the predicament therein) – a sketch of

which is attempted below – can be explained or elaboratedvii. Without such a critical

engagement, Chatterjee remains within the liberal strand of political theory, where the

expansion of liberal institutional order is presented as an unlimited, albeit a hindered

or interrupted, process. Since Chatterjee does not read the practices of

governmentality as political logics, governmentality almost becomes a shorthand for

such a liberal political order, always already in a position to accommodate and

subsume various negativities, particularly in the context of capitalist expansion –

which is an evolutionist view of political order. Chatterjee does not deconstruct the

metaphysics (of presence) of such political practices which could point to the

impossibility of constituting an order and thereby also demonstrate (again) the limit of

naming a political space as civil or political society.

If the theory of political society has to be statist, then it might be more helpful to

conduct a thorough investigation of the ways in which the postcolonial state ‘transacts

business with the population’ and the consequences of that on the established laws,

rules and norms from various perspectives/standpoints. What comes out of

Chatterjee’s description in various cases (and many scholars would also attest the

factual basis of those) is that the postcolonial state is contradictory and indecisive in

its conductviii: on the one hand, it is marked by hesitancy and weakness in obtaining

compliance to the existing codified norms, and in enforcing certain legal and

executive orders, and on the other hand, it can be extraordinarily violent (i.e. in using

violent means and in violating the constitutional rights, legal provisions, and

procedures) – all of which cannot be solely seen as a response to the manoeuvring in

political society. The other side of this argument is that law and rules can be

transgressed by the powerful people to exploit the members of political society or to

cause misery and inconvenience to them (e.g. encroachment of village and forest land

by the mining companies in Bellary in Karnataka; diversion of PDS rice, etc.). We

also know that in the face of resource scarcity and other impediments, the actors, both

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the powerful people and the members of political society, practise “jugad”, i.e. they

arrange for themselves. It is also possible to provide alternative explanations for the

postcolonial state’s tolerance of violation of (public) property rights, particularly in

the context of informal economy. Barbara Harriss-White (forthcoming, n.p.) provides

such an alternative argument:

The state may also have an interest in sustaining petty commodity production

[the economic domain where the members of political society predominate].

Its infrastructural responsibilities to employers may be avoided if production is

outsourced to petty producers, and it often does not enforce laws through

which the super-exploitative advantage of petty production would be

abolished, or enforce fiscal measures that would threaten through taxation the

nutrient-bed of petty production. So small-scale production and trade also

thrive because the capital involved does not accumulate sufficiently for the

revenue from tax to outweigh the costs of its collection. The state also

‘inadvertently’ subsidizes and promotes production by small enterprises

through condoning and not policing the onward lending of ‘formal’ credit on

terms and conditions which prevent the borrowers from accumulating (and of

late through permitting a mass of more or less experimental micro finance

arrangements). It subsidizes and promotes the reproduction of small

enterprises through whatever infrastructural and welfare interventions are

aimed at the households involved in it. To prevent mass unemployment,

widespread malnutrition, etc, for several decades it has had to transfer

resources – more or less exiguously – for politically stabilising policies that

prevent the destruction of small scale production, trade and services. In doing

[so,] it creates small enterprises it cannot regulate[,] and incidentally also

restricts accumulation.

These contradictory and indecisive – and perhaps pragmatic – approaches of the state

indicate towards a predicament which underlines the power relationships in a

postcolonial country. This predicament has been conceptualised as the condition of

‘dominance without hegemony’ by Ranajit Guha. Guha defines hegemony, within a

field of power, i.e. a “series of inequalities” or “unequal relationships” (Guha 1998,

20), as “a condition of Dominance (D) such that, in the organic composition of D,

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Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C)” and “hegemony operates as a dynamic

concept and keeps even the most persuasive structure of Dominance always and

necessary open to Resistance” (ibid 23, emphases in original). ‘Dominance without

hegemony’ is the condition where persuasion never manages to outweigh coercion,

i.e. coercion becomes explicit in the formation and operation of power relationships. It

is this condition that propels the development of strategies of co-optation and

negotiations, in an attempt to defer or modify the (often inevitable) application of

force.

In the Indian context, the bourgeoisie never loses sight of its interest in accumulating

capital, yet adopts various strategies to dispel the antagonisms faced in that process

and negotiates with certain impediments. Does the Indian bourgeoisie manage to

persuade ‘the people’ to facilitate the process of accumulation or does it ultimately

depend on the application of force, or a mix of both? This question returns in the

context of the recent economic transformation in India, on which Chatterjee has

published two articles in 2008.

In the first article, Chatterjee (2008a) engages with the political economy of the recent

economic transformation in India to delineate the changing relationships among the

dominant groups. Here, the central problematic is the sole ascendancy of private

industrial-corporate capital in India to the position of hegemonic domination which is

accomplished with the ‘connivance’ [in my words] of the ‘urban middle classes’—

“the sphere that seeks to be congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil

society” (Chatterjee 2008a, 57) – and the parallel decline of the ‘agrarian bourgeoisie’

(ibid 56). Such ascendancy of industrial-corporate capital is rendered possible through

‘primitive accumulation’, namely, “the dissociation of the labourer from the means of

labour [i.e. production]” (ibid 54) and the attendant transfer of those means of

production to the capitalists. Chatterjee thinks that political society again becomes a

significant field of contestation and interventions in this new context: the need to

reverse the effects of the ‘primitive accumulation’ necessitates that the governmental

agencies engage with political society to distribute the benefits, following the

modality described above. But this contestation has been part of ‘passive revolution of

capital’ right from the beginning of the postcolonial state’s career, as can be gleaned

from Sudipta Kaviraj’s critique (which is seen from the stand point of the state).

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Kaviraj’s critique of ‘passive revolution’ is predicated on the proposition that “the

state in India is a bourgeois state (Kaviraj 1997, 48) which “helps in capitalist

reproduction” (ibid 49 and passim) when capital on its own cannot expand through

market transactions and therefore depends on “the legitimized directive mechanisms

of the state.”

Kaviraj observes, “the Indian capitalist class exercises its control over society neither

through a moral-cultural hegemony of the Gramscian type, nor a simple coercive

strategy on the lines of satellite states of the Third World” (ibid 51 and passim). Such

a control is achieved through a “coalitional strategy carried out partly through the

state-directed process of economic growth, partly through the allocational necessities

indicated by the bourgeois democratic political system” (emphasis added).

The (capitalist) dominance over the society is achieved through the practices of

governance, which according to Kaviraj, “refers to the process of actual policy

decisions within the apparatuses of the state” (ibid 54 and passim). The dominance is

created by establishing sets of “vertical clientilist benefit coalitionix” [emphasis in

original] between the ruling bloc and subordinate classes through certain policies.

Such an approach is concerned with the “calculations of short-term political

advantages accruing from policies.” The objectivex of establishing benefit coalitions

is to “ensure that actual political configurations do not become symmetrical to class

divisions in society.”

Though one can argue, after Kaviraj, that creating vertical clientilist benefit coalitions

is the logics of political society vis-à-vis capitalist expansion and ‘primitive

accumulation’, yet it will be difficult to normatively evaluate it as a positive

development (in terms of expansion of freedom). An ‘agency argument’xi is not

enough to salvage such an evaluation. This is because the very condition of capital

accumulation depends on creating such vertical benefit coalitions, which is a ‘social

cost’ to accumulation, and such a cost does not alter or threaten the course of

capitalist transformation and expansion (in an ontological sense, not a historicist

sense, and thereby not a question of teleological transition). I will argue that such

vertical benefit coalitions and para-legal negotiations are simply a factual and

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descriptive state of affairs in the domain of power relationships, bereft of any

immediate normative problematizationxii. Since interventionist and transformational

politics requires a normative evaluation, and the significance and purchase of political

society depends on showing the actual expansion of freedom of the members of

political society, so it is also difficult to see any transformational potential of the

development of ‘political society’, parallel to ‘civil society’.

Let me summarize my critique of Chatterjee: The project of mapping the

differentiated political space or defending the communal way of life has not been

ultimately significant enough for Chatterjee to develop a theory of Indian/postcolonial

democracy; on the other hand, the practice of transgression of law, rules and norm in

India has to be accepted, but the point is whether we can undertake any normative

evaluation of this empirical context and proclaim that it helps in realizing the rights

and freedom of the members of political society. In other words, we need to question

whether the (political) sociological understanding of political society can help us to

develop a philosophical understanding of democracy in India. Alternatively, if the

transgression of law has to be taken seriously, then we should be able to use the

concept of political society to underline the undecidability and aporetic conditions

present in constitutionalism and in the process of realization of rights, justice and

freedom – which provides a critique of liberal theory of democracy, i.e. shows the

limit of democracy under capitalist system. This standpoint neither harbours a

Marxist/anarcho-communitarian suspicion towards constitutionalism, nor does it

attempt to furnish a liberal/modernist defence of the rule of law. This is what I mean

by ‘political society as critique’, which I elaborate below.

The context at hand is capitalist transformation which requires a reorganisation of

property relationships, mobility of capital, curbing labour rights, rationing social

benefits, grabbing resources and maintaining and enhancing the ‘value’ [actually,

price] of property through urban ‘development’ and beautification. Political society

can be a useful concept and an analytical tool to study the condition through which

antagonisms immanent and developed within this process of capitalist transformation

in a postcolonial country (i.e. the new frontiers of capitalist expansion and growth) are

deflected, deferred or nullified. The concept of political society therefore can be used

to critique this postcolonial condition. But that does not mean that we should overturn

16

Chatterjee’s insight and treat political society as a successful strategic field of the

dominant classes, which is structured to overcome the problematic of ‘dominance

without hegemony’, i.e. the development of non-coercive and persuasive political

condition for capitalist transformation. Violence is embedded in this process. Amita

Baviskar and Nandini Sundar (2008) draw attention to such an application of force

and infliction of violence in contemporary India. They argue that such an application

of force makes civil society “not a domain of hegemony”, “but of domination” (ibid

89), implying that the division and distinction of civil and political societies along the

axes of civility and legality is misleading.

If the concept of political society is to be treated as a critical tool, and no ready

transformational politics can be found within it, then the obvious question is: How

does one think about the political and transformational politics? Chatterjee’s critics

see politics in terms of contingency and the empirical specificity of a struggle, and fall

back on the ‘agency argument’. They suggest that in order to appreciate contemporary

subaltern politics, one needs to study the cases of resistance (John and Deshpande

2008, 86), to see the success in getting the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act

(NREGA), the Forest Act and the Right to Information Act as an outcome of people’s

“own degree of organization and their increased ability to speak in terms of the very

law that is used to dispossess them” (Baviskar and Sundar 2008, 88), and to look out

for “spaces, which the ruling classes are compelled to open up in an attempt to

legitimize their positions of power” so as to “(utilize) [those spaces] with a renewed

creativity by those fighting for a more equal, less exploitative social order” (Shah

2008, 81).

In reply to his critics, Chatterjee re-calibrates political society by introducing two

more concepts: “moral passion” and “populism” (populism is definitely a new turn in

his theorization). He explains:

…it is mistaken to claim that the dominant and propertied classes any longer

set the standards of morality for society; rather, in a democratic age, the moral

passion of entitlement and outrage is on the side of those who have little…

(Chatterjee 2008b, 92 and passim).

17

The political dimension in seen in terms of ‘struggle’ (clash and conflict) – not by

clarifying the negativity or antagonism at the ontological level (i.e. that what leads to

the conflict): “Since the intentions emerge from the arena of politics, it goes without

saying that they are shaped by the struggles between rival groups and classes in that

arena.”

The character of the politics which emerges in this field — a “field created by

governmentality”— is populist, and “populismxiii is the only morally legitimate form

of democratic politics today.” Thus, it seems that Chatterjee stands by his earlier

claim that the ‘politics of the governed’ is “shifting the historical horizon of political

modernity in most of the world” (Chatterjee 2004, 75).

This insistence on seeing political society as an innovative and promising political

development ignores the other possibilities of (progressive) political interventions.

The analysis of governmentality studies a very specify domain, namely the mode of

application and transformation in governmental rationality and power, and resistances

to it. This does not exhaust the possibilities of analysing other domains of power

relationships, the dislocating events within those, or anticipating other forms of

progressive political interventions. These limitations are also inherited by the analysis

of political society as such. Thus, the concept of political society as critique of Indian

politics is a much stronger position to defend.

Alternatively, we may adopt a different methodology to understand the political and

the transformational politics. We need to ask whether political theory should always

start with (a reflection on) the state and civil society, while trying to

understand/question the postcolonial political modernity. Instead of a statist/state-

centric normative discussion, can we not begin with the conceptualization of the

social, explicate its ontology, and then proceed from there to apprehend the quasi-

transcendental conditions of possibility and impossibility of political change?

CONCLUSION

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I have argued in this paper that the concept of political society can be more useful as a

critique of Indian politics, rather than an alternative normative theory, which can only

extend the criteria of recognition by the state. What the concept of political society

warns us is that a certain section of the society is marginalized and that their demands

do not become part of mainstream political articulations in civil society. Political

society alerts us about various strategies that are being developed, how people use the

spaces available in a democracy to raise/place various demands, and how those

demands are dealt in a piecemeal way to mitigate antagonism and in facilitating the

‘passive revolution of capital’. Yet, such strategies cannot fully hegemonise ‘the

people’, and force the bourgeoisie to resort to violent means. Political society as

critique marks out the problematic of perseverance of the condition of ‘dominance

without hegemony’ and the return or the spectre of ‘the people’xiv in a democracy.

Chatterjee reminds us, “governmentality always operates on a heterogeneous social

field, on multiple population groups, and with multiple strategies” (Chatterjee 2004,

60 and passim). And we have seen that the politics in political society is “necessarily

temporary and contextual.” Thus, any political intervention that wants to overcome

this fragmentary and temporary politics would necessarily require an engagement in

hegemonic politics, a process of constructing a broader political movement beyond

the fragmentary ones. There are programmatic issues involved in such a

transformational politics; but any mediation on such political programmes cannot

begin without understanding the specificity of the postcolonial condition and

predicament, which in turn, requires an ontological analysis. The outcome of such an

analysis will not necessarily initiate transformation, but will at least provide a critical

insight about the political processes.

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ENDNOTES:

i This paper is a modified and expanded form of another paper published in 2008 (Sarkar 2008). ii This participation-through-manoeuvring is not based on a communal way of life, i.e. it is not a question of communal way of life helping in the formation of a group, analogous to the concept of class-in-itself. Successful manoeuvring depends on access to mediators, as we will see below. iii Samir Kumar Das argues that there are sections of the population who escape the calculative logic of enumeration and thereby they become the ‘ungoverneds’. But it is not clear why this should be the case, i.e. what kind of logical inconsistency or limit of governmentality is involved here is not readily understood. iv One can observe the nascent attempts at expanding governmentality beyond the state in projects like the Unique Identity. v This problematic is central in Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality. Refer to ‘Two Lectures’ by Foucault (1980), particularly pp. 97-98. vi I borrow the term ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ from Chantal Mouffe, where ‘the political’ refers to “the dimension of antagonism which [is] constitutive of human societies”, and ‘politics’ refers to “the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political” (Mouffe 2005, 9). vii Also, without such a consideration, the emergence of political subjects cannot be understood. The Foucauldian understanding of subject formation through subjection to power has been thoroughly criticized by Derrida. Refer to Derrida (1972 and 1973) and Ernesto Laclau (1990). viii Say the hesitancy of the erstwhile Left Front Government of West Bengal in the case of the rotting corpse of Balak Brahmachari of the Santan Dal (a religious sect) (Chatterjee 2004, 41-51), and the same Government’s use of police force, time and again, in suppressing and killing (political) dissidents (in Marichhjhapi, Singur and Nandigram). ix I will argue that this can be seen as the institutionalized form of the colonial idiom of ‘Improvement’, through which “the colonial rulers [used] to relate nonantagonistically to the ruled (Guha 1998, 30, emphasis added). x Arun Patnaik offered an alternative argument. Patnaik (1988, 30) found the poverty alleviation programmes and targeting the poor in the 1970s as the “state’s paternalistic

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attitude to the rural poor”, through which the state “diffused among the poor peasants its own organizational contradictions and tried to wean them away from the social contradictions of the real life.” xi I will argue that the question of agency in these discussions always arises ex post facto, at the moment of attributing the credit (or autonomy) of the action to a particular subject. The question of identification and recognition of that subject is very much part of the above objective. Therefore, to consider the ‘agency’ as a (starting) premise of an argument is limited in explaining the case. xii One can develop this argument further by engaging with Jacques Rancière’s concept of politic(al/)s as ‘disagreement’ (1998 and 2004), which necessarily involves such a problematization. xiii In defence of ‘populism’, Chatterjee quotes Ernesto Laclau. But, I think, it is a misapplication. For Laclau (2007 and 2005), populism stands as a problematic of staging the people within democracy, which is preceded by a Claude Lefort-inspired understanding of power, which is empty (i.e. there is a lack) at the core, and hegemonic politics is practised in an attempt to fill or occupy that emptiness or lack. ‘People’ becomes the constituency constructed or is the locus in this hegemonic political practice. xiv The populist question, similar to Laclau and Rancière.