Parallel trends and counter-tendencies have been at work especially in the post-Nehru period both in center-state relations and in the relations between state governments and district institutions. With regard to center-state relations, the offices and institutions of state government have increasingly been turned into instruments for implementing the will of the central government leadership. The counter-tendencies, partly arising out of India's regional/cultural heterogeneity but also in response to the imposition of Delhi's direct and indirect rule over the states, have been the regionalization of state politics and party systems, the increasing assertion of demands for revision of center-state relations, for regional autonomy, and even for outright secession.

Insofar as district and local politics are concerned, similar processes have been at work. On the one hand, ruling parties in the state governments, particularly the Congress, have allowed district and local institutions of self-government to decline or have limited their powers or have even frequently superseded them altogether in order to maintain tighter control over local systems of patronage and to establish stable bases of local support. The counter-tendency has been the persistence, even the reassertion, of structures of local power which exist independently of government and party organizations and the revival of interest, especially among the non-Congress parties, in the restoration of local institutions of self-government.

STATE POLITICS

Roles of the state governor

The constitutional role provided for the state governors and the practices which have evolved in relation to the office of governor since Independence have provided the focal point of contestation over the relative balance between autonomy and central control in center-state relations. The national leadership in the Constituent Assembly was concerned to maintain the strength of the Center in relation to the states and to have the recourse to intervene in cases of serious instability and political and communal unrest. At the same time, they wished to establish full parliamentary government at the state as well as the central levels, in which a governor with executive power would be inconsistent. The Constitution partly reflects this ambiguity in its specification of the appointment and powers of the state governors.

AGRARIAN ISSUES IN INDIAN POLITICS

The year 1966 was a major turning point in the history of Indian agricultural development policy. In that year, three significant sets of events occurred that profoundly affected the determination of Government of India policy makers to intensify measures to increase agricultural production as rapidly as possible in order to make India self-sufficient in foodgrains. The first was the great drought/famine of 1966-67 in north India, which followed upon a previous bad year for Indian agriculture and which occurred simultaneously with scarcity conditions in other areas of the country. The second was the initial harvesting of the new HYVs of wheat brought to India in the winter of 1965-66 by Norman Borlaug and his associates and planted in several locations in north India and elsewhere during the rabi (winter) season of 1966. The third was a combination of domestic and international factors affecting U.S. government foreign policy making, including the Vietnam war, U.S. balance of payments problems, and the potential use of U.S. food exports for hard currency payments to alleviate those problems.

Although these three sets of events constituted a turning point, the solutions adopted to deal with the crisis events of 1966-67, namely, the drought and shifts in U.S. attitudes toward India, were entirely consistent with previous Indian government policies for economic development, agricultural development, and agrarian reform. Those policies, which focused on the rapid adoption of the HYVs and the associated technology, ignored the long-standing issues of agrarian reform and were designed to be acceptable to the dominant political and economic elites in the provincial capitals and in the Indian countryside. They fed into and reinforced historic regional and social imbalances in economic development in India. They ignored the problems of the small cultivators in vast regions of the country, most notably in the great rainfed paddy-growing areas of India stretching from eastern U. P. to Bengal and including as well large parts of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Assam. They also failed to solve, only postponed facing the hard solutions to, the basic production problems of Indian agriculture in those areas of the country that comprise the bulk of its territory and population and that depend upon the monsoon or lack either adequate irrigation or dependable rainfall.

India's national leaders had to confront several language problems in the first two decades of Independence and what appeared to some of them in the aftermath of Partition to be a real threat of the “Balkanization” of the country. These problems included the official language issue, demands for the linguistic reorganization of the provinces of India whose boundaries during British rule did not conform to linguistic divisions, and the status of minority languages within reorganized states. Most of the language conflicts in the Nehru period, some of which became at times bitter and violent, were ultimately resolved through pluralistic solutions. The central government and the national leadership of the Congress sought to avoid direct confrontations with the language movements and their leaders and adopted instead arbitrating and mediating roles wherever possible. In the case of the movements for linguistic reorganization of states, until mutual agreements were reached among contending language groups and their leaders, the Center attempted to ensure that the state governments were under the control of strong leaders whom it supported in efforts to maintain civil order.

In the post-Nehru period, however, several linguistic, ethnic, and regional movements have escalated to levels of bitterness and violence never experienced in the Nehru period except in the tribal regions of the northeast. It will be argued in the following chapter that the centralizing drives of the Indian state under Mrs. Gandhi's leadership and the manipulative and interventionist strategies pursued by the central government and its leaders in state politics have contributed to the intensity of such conflicts during the past two decades. Most of the problems discussed in this chapter, however, were resolved during the Nehru period and will provide a base for comparison with the unresolved problems which have persisted into the 1980s and 1990s.

THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE PROBLEM

Before independence, the most salient language issue in Indian politics concerned the relative positions of Hindi and Urdu and of the Devana-gari and Persian-Arabic scripts.

Party politics in India display numerous paradoxical features, which reveal the blending of Western and modern forms of bureaucratic organization and participatory politics with indigenous practices and institutions. India's leading political party, the Indian National Congress, is one of the oldest in the world, yet it has not succeeded in providing the nucleus for an institutionalized party system which can be fitted easily into any one of the conventional categories of party systems known in the West. There has been a strong Marxist and Communist revolutionary tradition in modern Indian political history. However, unlike other such traditions in most parts of Asia, its dominant parties and movements have neither succeeded in threatening the stability of the Indian state nor been threatened with physical extinction as in Indonesia, but have instead been integrated in the form of reformist political parties within routine politics in the country. The diversities and social fragmentation of Indian society have produced a proliferation of regional and other political parties which often give to each state in the Indian Union a unique party system imperfectly integrated into the “national party system.” Some characteristically Indian features pervade virtually all parties in the country — factionalism, dynastic succession to leadership, and the presence of ideological differences among the parties without ideological cleavage in the party system.

Indian politics are distinctive among contemporary developing societies in having had forty-five years of nearly continuous—excepting the brief Emergency period — competitive electoral politics in which also alternation in power has occurred in all the Indian states and at the Center as well. Here, also, there are numerous paradoxical features and indigenous adaptations of an essentially British electoral system. These include: varying, but often quite high turnout rates among a population still overwhelmingly agrarian and illiterate; a special form of representation for “untouchables” or Scheduled Castes; electoral arenas not yet fully dominated and controlled by organized political parties; and the critical importance of the electoral process as a mechanism for the successive introduction of groups of voters, particularly caste groups, into politics, which impart to the Indian electoral process a quality which is quite different from the classic ideal of the electoral arena as a place where the “independent intelligence of the individual voter” is exercised.

India arrived at Independence after a long struggle and with a multiplicity of heritages and legacies which influenced its post-Independence course in complex ways. Among the legacies were the long experience of British rule itself, which extended back more than two centuries, and of the various institutions, ideas, and practices, introduced by the British. Of particular importance at Independence was the Government of India Act of 1935, which was the most recent framework of rule under which the country was governed and which included a considerable measure of responsible government for Indians in the provinces. A second legacy was that provided by the shared experience of those Indians who participated in or identified with the nationalist movement and its great leaders. A third was the existing social order, the social structure and social conflicts which surrounded and influenced political movements, ideas, and practices. Finally, there was the great body of traditions and cultural practices which preceded British rule in a civilization of great depth, complexity, and diversity.

THE CONSTITUTION AND THE COLONIAL LEGACY

In some ways, it is possible to view Independence and the adoption in the early years after Independence of a new Constitution as another stage in the evolution of India toward representative government in a process that dates back to the Indian Councils Act of 1861 and continues through the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, and the Government of India Act of 1935. At each of these reforms, the participation of Indians in the central and state legislatures and in the executive councils was increased and the franchise was extended to ever larger numbers of people.

It has often been noted especially that there was a considerable degree of continuity between the Government of India Act and the Constitution of India. The features of continuity included the adoption of a federal system of government with three legislative lists of powers to be exercised exclusively by the Union, exclusively by the states, or concurrently, and a combination of a considerable degree of provincial autonomy with extensive powers left to the Center, including emergency powers which made it possible to convert the federal system into a unitary one.

Linguistic federalism has proven to be a satisfactory means of maintaining the unity of India and the loyalty of the citizens of its principal language regions. No territorial solution to ethnic problems, however, can by itself satisfy the claims of all minority groups. We have seen that many minority language speakers have remained within the linguistically reorganized states and that several political movements have arisen among them claiming discrimination against their language by the speakers of the dominant regional language in a state.

Moreover, the political leaders of India have not been able to resolve as satisfactorily as in the case of the major language groups the political demands and the political status of non-Hindu and tribal minority groups. States reorganization has either failed or been a far more prolonged and violent process before satisfying the political aspirations of the Sikhs in the Punjab and the tribal peoples in the northeastern region. Outright secessionist movements accompanied by bitter, prolonged, and bloody confrontations between insurrectionary groups and government security forces marked the politics of Punjab, Assam, and the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir as well in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Finally, forty-five years after partition, Indian state leaders had failed to resolve satisfactorily the persistence of Hindu-Muslim communal division, which continued to find expression in vicious killing in cities and towns in many parts of the country.

The question naturally arises, therefore, whether India has departed from its proclaimed secularism and become a state based implicitly on a Hindu definition of nationality. It will be argued here and in the following chapter, on the contrary, that it is the secular ideology itself together with the persistent centralizing drives of Indian state leaders and the unending struggle for power in New Delhi, intensified during Mrs. Gandhi's leadership of the country, which have been more responsible for the failures to resolve the political problems of non Hindu minorities.

Ideas play a large role in Locke's philosophy. In Locke's view, everything existing or occurring in a mind either is or includes an idea; and all human knowledge both starts from and is founded on ideas. The very word “idea” appears more frequently in the Essay concerning Human Understanding than any other noun, - its occurrences outnumber even those of such common words as “he” “have,” and “for.”

Locke's ideas have, however, perplexed readers and provoked critics from the time of the Essay's first publication. His contemporary Edward Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worcester, noted the novelty of the term “idea” and charged that Locke's use of it had encouraged “ill men” to take up the “new way of ideas” and use it “to promote scepticism and infidelity, and to overthrow the mysteries of our faith” (W IV: 129-30). Stillingfleet had no objection to Locke's own use of the word, much less to ideas themselves, since he took these to differ only nomine from the “common notions of things, which we must make use of in our reasonings” (ibid.). But John Sergeant, another contemporary critic, found “idea,” as used in the Essay, to be “highly Equivocal, or Ambiguous”;and he argued that in at least one of the meanings assigned it by Locke the word stands for nothing at all, a “meer Fancie” (Sergeant 1697: 3; Preface). This charge of ambiguity, especially, has been a staple of Locke criticism for three centuries: Thomas Reid advanced it, and so did Gilbert Ryle, who wrote, echoing Sergeant, that not only is “the term ‘idea’ . . . used by Locke in a number of completely different senses,” but “there is one sense in which he uses the term . . . in which it must be categorically denied that there are such things as ‘ideas at all. And, ” Ryle continued, “had this been the only sense in which Locke used the term, then his whole Essay would have been, what it is not, a laboured anatomy of utter nonentities” (Ryle 1933: 17).

In the course of its considerable length the Essay concerning Human Understanding deals with many topics; but its main theme and concern is knowledge and the capacity of the human understanding to acquire it. “[M]y Purpose” Locke tells us, is “to enquire into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge; together, with the Grounds and Degrees of Belief, Opinion, and Assent” (E I.i.2: 43). What is knowledge and how is it acquired? Are there any limits to what we can know and, therefore, things about which we can have only beliefs and things about which we must be ignorant? What, indeed, is the difference between knowledge and belief? As its title indicates, the Essay intends these as questions more about the human knower and believer rather than about what is known and believed. What can we, with our minds, know? In setting out to inquire into knowledge Locke is setting out “to take a Survey of our own Understandings, examine our own Powers, and see to what Things they were adapted”(E I.i.7: 47).

In the background to his questions was a contemporary debate that arose from a large number of arguments against the very possibility of knowledge, arguments that were found in an account of early Greek skepticism, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, written by Sextus Empiricus (fl. A.D. 200). Pointing out that people disagree, these arguments challenge anyone who thinks the truth can be found to say who is its proper judge or real discoverer. Pointing out that our senses are unreliable and our reasonings often mistaken, they ask by what means truth is to be discovered.

John Locke is the most influential philosopher of modern times. His Essay initiated the vigorous and lasting philosophical tradition that is known as British empiricism, but Locke's importance reaches far beyond the limits of what has since his time become recognized as the professional discipline of philosophy. His influence in the history of thought, on the way we think about ourselves and our relations to the world we live in, to God, nature and society, has been immense. His great message was to set us free from the burden of tradition and authority, both in theology and knowledge, by showing that the entire grounds of our right conduct in the world can be secured by the experience we may gain by the innate faculties and powers we are born with. God “commands what reason does” (W VII: n ) are the words that best reveal the tenor and unity of Locke's thought.

THE CORPUSCULARIAN CONCEPTION OF BODY

Locke's treatment of such central philosophical issues as substance, qualities, identity, natural kinds, and the structure and limits of scientific explanation was fundamentally shaped by the conception of body (or as we would say it nowadays, the basic nature of material things) that he inherited from Gassendi and Boyle. This conception of body was part of what Boyle called the corpuscularian hypothesis, or corpuscularianism. This doctrine, a form of mechanistic atomism, had the following core tenets:

1. The matter of all bodies is the same in kind, namely, extended solid substance.

2. All bodies are either (a) individual atoms or corpuscles, which are physically indivisible and which have as their only qualities (in addition to extension and solidity) size, shape, location, motion or rest, and number; or (b) aggregates or collections of atoms. There are no physically real components or constituents of a body beyond its component atoms (except for the material that “glues” the atoms together, if any). Compound bodies have a further quality, their “texture,” which is the arrangement of their component atoms resulting from their various sizes, shapes, relative situations, and relative motions.

3. All changes of state of bodies are due to a change in texture (note that atoms cannot change their size or shape, since they are indivisible); and all changes in texture are the result of impact or contact action of one body upon another. That is to say, all causation involving bodies is mechanical causation.

Locke's failures are sometimes as significant as his successes. His views on morality are a case in point. He published little on the subject, and what little he did publish raised more problems for his readers than it solved. Some of the difficulties contemporaries perceived in Locke's ethics are indicated in a retort by a critic, who was piqued by Locke's suggestion that the critic was part of a plot against him:

Locke's political philosophy has generally been presented and assessed in terms of certain conclusions drawn from a few basic premises. Since Locke's political theory was not constructed according to the presuppositions of analytical philosophy, such an interpretive approach to his political thought seems better designed to portray Locke as an inconsistent or unclear thinker than to provide the reader of the Two Treatises of Government with an understanding of what Locke was attempting to do in writing that work.

I propose in this essay to follow another interpretive path by beginning with Locke's conclusion, namely, that “it is lawful for the people . . . to resist their King” (T II.xix.232: 437), and ask how and why did he come to that conclusion? If, as I shall argue, it was part of Locke’s intentional objective in writing the Two Treatises to persuade his readers that they should resist the king, then putting the question in this form will assign considerable importance to determining the relationship between political theorizing and engagement in political actions.

John Locke was born on August 28, 1632, into a family of very minor Somerset gentry. His father, John Locke senior, owned some houses and land in and around Pensford, a small town some seven miles south of Bristol. He supplemented his income from this by practicing as an attorney and by taking a series of minor administrative posts in local government.

Locke's family seems to have had puritan sympathies, and after the outbreak of the Civil War his father served as a captain in one of the parliamentary armies, in a cavalry regiment commanded by a very much more substantial figure among the Somerset gentry, Alexander Popham. Popham's regiment served under Waller, was defeated at the Battle of Devizes in July 1643, and subsequently dispersed.

Locke's father's association with Popham, whom he continued to serve in his professional capacity and from whom he leased part of his land, had one consequence of enormous benefit to his son. Popham, since 1645 the member of Parliament for Bath, had sufficient influence to recommend boys for places at Westminster School, at that time the foremost school in England. Locke entered Westminster in 1647. The education there was centered almost entirely around the ancient languages, first Latin, then Greek, and finally, for the most academically proficient pupils, Hebrew. Locke made sufficient progress with the last of these to be able to compose an oration in Hebrew shortly before he left the school.

The topics to be covered in this chapter are as follows: (I) Locke's acceptance of Descartes's view that there is a radical separation, a perhaps unbridgeable gap, between the world's mental and its physical aspects; Locke's view of (II) the cognitive aspects and (III) the conative aspects of the mind; (IV) what Locke said about the possibility that “ matter thinks” that is, that the things that take up space are also the ones that have mental states; (V) the question whether all thought could be entirely caused by changes in the physical world; (VI and VII) what it is for a single mind to last through time; and (VIII) what it is for a mind to exist at a time when it is not doing anything.

PROPERTY DUALISM

Descartes held a position that is sometimes called “property dualism.” According to it, the properties that things can have fall into two classes - those pertaining to materiality and those pertaining to mentality - with no overlap between them. This is best understood as involving also a dualism of concepts: the concepts that can be applied to things fall into two classes, with no concept in either class being reducible to or explainable through any belonging to the other class.

Locke's first reference to language in the “Epistle to the Reader” at the outset of his Essay concerning Human Understanding suggests merely a pragmatic, Baconian insistence that we must strive for clarity in language because obscurity of speech is a frequent but avoidable source of theoretical confusion: “The greatest part of the Questions and Controversies that perplex Mankind [depend] on the doubtful and uncertain use of Words, or (which is the same) indetermined Ideas, which they are made to stand for” (E Epis: 13). Such a statement does not imply that one needs any theory about language in order to avoid such problems, but just a special degree of care in its ordinary use. Later passages might also be taken to suggest such a Baconian stance, free of any specific linguistic theory: