India inside out

In part inspired by how the rest of the world, the West in particular, has perceived Indian politics – or, more specifically, has failed to understand Indian politics – this new work undertakes to detail the country's political history over the last two decades, focusing on the myriad political formations that have shaped the dense political landscape. In explanation of this project, the authors refer to a postcolonial political theorist when they write: "It is revealing of what Mahmood Mamdani has identified as a 'denial of a history and a politics' – what we might term the denial of an 'inside' – to the non-West. There it is, mysterious and inscrutable; its intriguing surfaces always only available to be gazed upon from the outside."

To credit Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam – both political theorists based in Delhi – most people in, for instance, the US are relatively oblivious to the fact that India has a rich and complex political history. But in fact, this idea of India's apolitical inscrutability goes well beyond white Americans. During the early to mid-1990s, the ushering of Hindu rightwing parties into the Indian Parliament saw a concurrent organising of Hindutva cultural events in the US by the Indian diaspora, which in turn proliferated the image of an India that was unadulterated by politics, functioning instead off the projections of Hindutva. Even more recently, the push by Hindutva supporters in California to rewrite sections on Indian history in school textbooks showed a similar trend.

Amidst the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka, some political theorists have attempted to outline plans to solve the ethnic conflict by restructuring the government apparatus around a federal political system that is similar to India's; or, more provocatively, through politico-economic integration with India. Though worth some serious analysis, these arguments often fall into a blind celebration of Indian democracy – failing to understand the conflicts and political contestations that are so much a part of India's contemporary and post-Independence history. Such apolitical ideas of India do not address the struggles of many communities or the violations of rights, such as in Jammu & Kashmir and the Indian Northeast. Menon and Nigam successfully capture this unique political history. They also challenge the Indian left to take this history into account and reconsider its strategies, in order to struggle for those oppressed within the structures of Indian state and society.

Ignoring democracy
Although the authors focus on Indian politics post-1989, they do not ignore preceding events. They begin the book with the political trajectory of post-Independence India – the entrenchment of the Congress Party at Independence, the repressive years of the Emergency of the mid-1970s, and the Congress-dominated 1980s. They note that the period immediately after the Emergency – characterised by the rise of the broad coalition Janata Party – marks a form of politics that would remain characterised by complex political equations among often seemingly divergent social movements and political parties vying for their interests. During this period, Menon and Nigam also note the upwelling of movements and political parties, from the political left to the right, advocating a broader set of issues that would ultimately transform India's political landscape. They follow the shifts that characterise the post-1989 period, which occurred in tandem with India's engagement with global economic and political changes. In turn, this inevitably augmented the collapse of the post-Independence so-called Nehruvian Consensus, which consisted of a self-reliant economy based on an import-substituting industrial strategy, a broadly secular polity and a non-aligned foreign policy.

Menon and Nigam's discussions on political actors and affiliations at all levels within a certain set of themes – caste politics, Hindutva, globalisation, the left, the nation and its border, and India in the rest of the world – are filled with feminist politics and theorisations. Furthermore, these discussions do not take place within the confines of each theme, rather, they show the inter-relationship of these issues. For instance, the authors take on the topic of caste violence, as it relates to communal violence and Hindutva. Borrowing from B R Ambedkar's thoughts on communal violence, the book mentions, "Hinduism targeted Muslims and Christians as a way of dealing with their own lower-caste/Dalit people, who wanted to exit from the Hindu social order."

The authors certainly have no dearth of subject matter. The history of political topics surveyed here includes perspectives on secularism within the right and left movements, the impact of mega-development projects and dispossession, and regional language/ethnic/caste politics. Importantly, such historical framing is also related to discussions around very contemporary issues, including Nandigram, where attempts to build a special economic zone displaced local people; the abuse of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, particularly in conflict-affected areas such as Kashmir and Manipur; and the India-US nuclear deal, which only this summer dramatically shook the stability of the ruling coalition.

Analysis of the impact of the changing politics on the judiciary and the media in the last two decades constitutes a particularly crucial aspect of this work. There have been politically significant rulings by the courts on the issue of economic dispossession, such as the Supreme Court ruling in 2000 on the Narmada Bachao Andolan petition, which permitted the continued construction of the Sardar Sarovar project on the Narmada. Such selective interpretations by the judiciary for the new political dispensation are characterised by the "Supreme Court speaking in the voice of the developmentalist rational state," Menon and Nigam write, "valorising the voice of 'experts' and ignoring the pressures of democracy altogether." The media's tremendous impact on reshaping conceptions of gender in the Subcontinent is also explored: "The popular media, visual and print, both in English and other Indian languages, are full of accounts and images of the sexual revolution that India has supposedly undergone in the last decade of the 20th century." At the same time, they warn, "much of this reporting is sensationalist and voyeuristic, not always approving of these trends, and quite often sexist and homophobic."

The authors work similar angles into their theoretical discussions in many places. These arise most notably in a section on the old versus the new left, where they cite the sociologist Gail Omvedt to push the idea that a new left is a dissenting set of political formations, but one that might not actually have a broad-based ideology. This idea blends with how the authors frame political actions that push sexuality into the public sphere. Their organisation of this subject differentiates notions of feminism that reinforce the Hindu rightwing agenda of censorship from feminism that promotes women's right to sexual self-expression.

Sensitively engaging with works of many theorists with regards to postcolonial theory and 'subaltern' studies, Power and Contestation weaves complex political formulations into its historical narrative. For example, in their discussion of shifting and re-organising the urban poor, the authors cite Partha Chatterjee's work, which explores new discourses on public rights facilitated by the state. "It is not that there were no conflicts between the middle class citizens and the subaltern populations of the city living on the fringes of legality in the past," they write. "What is distinctive about the new situation is that the claim is now being made and pressed in the language of rights."

Rudderless left
Such a rich history of contemporary India raises a host of concerns and questions. Menon and Nigam characterise the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s rejection of the leadership of the new United Front coalition in 1996 as a "historic blunder", when the offer of prime ministership was made to the veteran communist leader and chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu. The argument, of course, is that the CPI (M) could have used such a historic opportunity to re-shape politics at the Centre, ultimately perhaps even countering the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, the disastrous years of Hindutva politics and the state-sponsored massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

The confidence of such claims raises questions about the history of the left's participation in coalition politics, where a position of leadership in governance without parliamentary strength could lead to its appropriation, rather than to the left shaping the agenda. The experience in Sri Lanka is a case in point, where the United Front government of the 1970s, with the left taking up key ministries, pandered to a Sinhala nationalist agenda and failed with a rapid economic experiment of a closed economy. This led to the irreversible decimation of the left in parliamentary politics as well as in the trade-union movement. While one is sympathetic to the argument of Menon and Nigam that the Indian left is rudderless and without an overarching vision, one is nevertheless forced to question the wisdom of biting off opportunities that might ultimately prove to be more than what the left can comfortably chew.

While Power and Contestation engages extensively with the neo-liberal dispensation in India, at the end these reviewers were somewhat perplexed as to why Menon and Nigam did not include an analysis of the larger impact of finance capital. This work has much to say about the expansion of the markets, but it is somehow limited in its discussion of international capital, as well as its regulating impact on both national capital and the momentum it has provided in pushing through liberalisation. It is not that one needs to believe in any deterministic role for finance capital. But a critique and engagement with how finance capital, in its most abstract and speedy circulation, interacts with cultural, social and political developments, would have been of significant interest to many readers who are aware of overarching global processes.

For the vast terrain that it addresses, this is a work that will be immensely useful for activists, both in and out of India, who want to engage its political history with an eye to sharpening their own political engagement at every level. It is also a fine tool for understanding politics in India, and to engage the next generation of activists. At a time unfortunately characterised by anti-intellectualism, rarely will activists find a work as politically vibrant, and yet as concise and accessible as this. With such a powerful yet accessible work on India, one can certainly look forward to similar treatments on other countries of Southasia.

~ Ahilan Kadirgamar is an activist with the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum in Colombo. Cenan Pirani is a Southasian activist based in Los Angeles.