Introduction: Why Politics and Education?

The ethnographer's research agenda is always susceptible to the interests and priorities of the people she studies. In my own research into developmentand conflict-related displacements, community-building and identity formation in Sri Lanka over the past two decades, education has been one such issue, which has kept reappearing in interesting and unpredictable ways because it is utterly important to people. In 2005 I decided to pursue the matter and explore the conditions, meanings and relevance of education in Muslim, Tamil and Sinhalese schools through ethnographic field research in and around schools. This simultaneously became a window into popular perceptions of the Sri Lankan state, national and local politicians and the state of contemporary politics.

In an introduction to anthropological approaches to democracy, Julia Paley asserts that democracy is most often identified by its most conspicuous features, namely ‘free and fair elections, a multi-party system, and freedoms of expression and the press’, but democracy, she suggests, is far more complex (Paley 2008, 3). Paley consequently urges us to adopt a more open-ended approach to democracy, paying attention to how democracy is perceived, practiced and produced over time by different actors in specific settings (Paley 2008, 19). Paley here follows a general anthropological inclination in the study of politics and the political, which is to critique and challenge theoretical conceptualisations that are based on Western historical experiences, but made to appear universal and generally applicable (Kabeer 2005).

Introduction

The turn of the twentieth century marked a critical watershed in the history of Indian public discourse about the ‘social question’. For the best part of the nineteenth century, the Indian intelligentsia had concentrated its energies on ‘social reform’, a term that denoted a desired transformation amongst highstatus castes and communities of cultural practices that were perceived as being both irrational and the root cause of India's decline as a civilization. The attention of social reformers had focused on ‘traditional’ indigenous customs such as prohibitions on female education, child marriage, polygyny, female infanticide, sati, purdah and the pitiable state of widows and devadasis, all of which were characterized as ‘perverted, twisted, distorted practices born of ignorance and fear and followed without recourse to common sense’. Social reformers were particularly concerned with the oppressed condition of women and viewed their emancipation ‘as the first step towards progress’. However, from the late 1890s onwards, members of the largely upper-caste Indian intelligentsia widened the debates on the ‘social question’ to include the condition of the lower orders of society. Thus, alongside the rhetoric and practice of ‘social reform’ there gradually emerged a new discourse of ‘social service’.

Those who took to ‘social service’ sought to ‘civilize’ the urban poor by eradicating ‘vices’ such as drunkenness, gambling and prostitution, and inculcating in them ‘enlightened’ values regarding sanitation and hygiene.

Introduction

The assumption that factions constitute an elementary aspect of Indian political organisation at all levels was a predominant one in Indian studies in the 1960s and 1970s. From the remotest village to the higher echelons of the pan-Indian Congress party, factions were seen as one of the building blocks of Indian politics. By the 1970s this idea had become so popular that they, in the words of Ranajit Guha (1976, 147), like Russian submarines began to be reported from everywhere. Yet with the decline of village politics studies in rural anthropology and sociology, the fascination with factions gradually evaporated, and today ‘factionalism’ is often dismissed altogether as a concept that, although not entirely without an empirical referent, really tells us very little about the larger and interesting issues of postcolonial politics (Spencer 2007, 36).

In this article I revisit the debate on the role of factions in Indian politics and argue that factions continue to play an important role in India's contemporary democratic set-up. I focus in particular on the case of the Congress party in West Bengal, where the party has – as amply demonstrated in the works of Weiner (1962; 1967), Franda (1971), and Sengupta (1985; 1988) – a factional history that has centred on conflicts and rivalries between personalities aspiring for positions of political leadership, with leaders whose ambitions have gone unfulfilled frequently breaking away with their followers to establish and lead new ‘Congress parties’ of their own.

Nepal is a challenge for political scientists. Is it more a case of a failed state in need of fundamental restructuring or merely of a state that is failing to deliver, but that can be brought back to a more effective and efficient condition? The difference is more than a question of semantics. The former could lead to secession and the break-up of the state of Nepal in the face of regional and ethnic communities demanding greater autonomy and the right to selfdetermination. In this scenario it is the politics of identity that will continue to dominate and drive the agenda. The latter might see the current frustrations with the present state lead to its reorganisation, possibly to a federal rather than a unitary form; but it operates with a belief that the conditions for an effective and efficient state remain. This would suggest that the more fundamental challenge lies in the reform of governance and in making it more representative of the diversity of Nepal's citizens.

The challenge in analysing and understanding Nepal is that indicators pointing to both possibilities are present in the post-conflict scenario in which peace has yet to be secured. The state's security forces lack effective control in many areas, there is a strongly voiced demand for autonomous provinces based on ethnicity, there is a strong and growing opposition to the rule of law by politicians and political parties' organisations, the army has openly contested rule by civilian government, and the drafting of a new constitution is so contested that the constituent assembly has been extended for a further year until the end of May 2011.

Introduction

War and displacement create specific connections between local and global processes. In this chapter, we explore such connections by way of analysing the politics of representation and identity among Tamils in Sri Lanka and in the Tamil diaspora.

Introduction

A little more than a decade ago, Sahlins (1999) argued that we are encountering an indigenisation of modernity, that is, the world is ‘being re-diversified by indigenous adaptations to the global juggernaut’. Exogenous elements are being integrated into and adapted to one's own culture. In passing one may note a small example of this constant process in Sahlins' quote itself: the term ‘juggernaut’, originating in present-day Orissa as an Anglicization of Lord Jagannath (Lord of the Universe), whose ‘powerful force’ is demonstrated in the annual car festival (rath yatra), apparently impressed the British colonisers. This cultural encounter not only led to the adoption of this word by the English language, the word itself also acquired a new meaning in the process.

More recently, such dynamics of indigenisation have been explored in relation to democracy in India (de Souza 2006; Michelutti 2007; Tanabe 2007), from which it has been demonstrated that democracies are equally culturally inflicted. Processes of democratisation depend largely on already existing socio-cultural configurations, depositions and repertoires.

Introduction

Domestic politics are playing an increasingly important role in the shaping of Indian foreign policy just as India is poised to play a more important role in world politics. This is a relatively new phenomenon and the consequences for Indian foreign policy are not yet clear. Until the late 1980s, foreign policy was largely the prerogative of the executive – as exercised by the Prime Minister directly through the Ministry of External Affairs – and was relatively autonomous from domestic politics. While elections and politics in India seldom revolve around foreign policy issues, the content of foreign policy is no longer insulated from domestic politics when the interests of important groups are involved. Foreign and security policy-making, however, are still centralized in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and parliament does not have veto power over foreign policy initiatives, such as treaties. The PMO has the added advantage in its dealings with parliament in its access to expert opinions not available to members of parliament. Despite this structural advantage, the growing importance of public opinion connects to the formulation of policy, which will be analyzed below. In the context of levels of analysis, this piece focuses on the state unit and we will only marginally analyze the influence of the international system on foreign policy, specific decision makers or intrabureaucratic negotiations.

Stig Toft Madsen is a Danish South Asianist affiliated with the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS). His interests range from Udupi catering and hoteliering in Goa and Gokarn to the relation between foreign jihadi guests and tribal hosts in Pakistan. His recent publications include ‘The Political Culture of Factionalism among Hindu Nationalists in Denmark’ (Critical Asian Studies 41 [2], 2009: 255–80, co-authored with Kenneth Bo Nielsen); and ‘EU-India Relations: An Expanded Interpretive Framework’, published in The Role of the European Union in Asia (Ashgate 2009). In his article ‘Being On and Being In: Exposure and Influence of Academic Experts in Contemporary Denmark’, forthcoming in Cultural Expertise and Litigation: Patterns, Conflicts, Narratives (Routledge), Madsen draws on his experience as a media commentator to discuss the role of the academic expert.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is research fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. An anthropologist by training, Nielsen has written on the Hindu diaspora in Denmark and on rural social movements in West Bengal, India. Recent publications include ‘Four Narratives of a Social Movement in West Bengal’ (South Asia 32 [3], 2009: 448–68); ‘Farmers’ Use of the Courts in an Anti-Land Acquisition Movement in India's West Bengal’ (Journal of Legal Pluralism 59, 2009: 121–44) and ‘Contesting India's Development? Industrialisation, Land Acquisition and Protest in West Bengal’ (Forum for Development Studies 37 [2], 2010: 145–70).

The European form of liberal democracy is derived from a singular set of historical and political developments particular to Western Europe, and constitutes only one among a range of alternative conceptions that have grown out of different social conditions (Frankel 2000; Jayal 2001, 9; Taylor 2007; Nugent 2008). In Trysts with Democracy, we analyse those clusters of political practices that combine to constitute democracy and democratic processes in South Asia. We do this by asking how democratic values are embedded in social and political institutions in South Asia, and how widely held ‘everyday’ political values inform the multiple ways in which democracy is imagined, understood and appropriated.

When Karl Marx surveyed British India, he dismissed its village communities as ‘the solid foundation of Oriental despotism’ (Marx 2000, 16–17). Since then democracy has acquired considerable temporal depth on the Indian Subcontinent. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, elections to municipalities and district boards were initiated under British rule. Autonomous and responsible provincial legislative councils were created around the First World War and fully developed with the Government of India Act in 1935. In Sri Lanka universal suffrage was already in place before Ceylon became independent (Richardson and Samarasinghe 1998), while independence brought universal adult suffrage to India. In 2008, a century and a half after Marx's observation, a Lokniti political science association team surveyed the state of democracy in South Asia and found the once solid foundation of Oriental despotism apparently crumbling.

Hearing the phrase ‘civilizing mission’ usually conjures up the idea of European colonialism, so it seems to be a rather dated nineteenth-century expression. In the nineteenth- and twentieth-century era of imperialism the civilizing mission was an ever-shifting set of ideas and practices that was used to justify and legitimize the establishment and continuation of overseas colonies, both to subject peoples and to citizens or subjects in the homeland. For the British Raj in India the civilizing mission meant many things, including bringing the benefits of British culture to the subcontinent in the form of free trade and capitalism as well as law, order and good government. British rule was supposed to bring an end to a supposed condition of chronic warfare, violence, disorder and despotic rule in India, and it would institute peace and order in the form of Pax Britannica. At its core, the civilizing mission was about morally and materially ‘uplifting’, ‘improving’ and later ‘developing’ the supposedly ‘backward’ or ‘rude’ people of India to make them more civilized and more modern. A fundamental difference between colonial subjects in India and their British overlords was posited, with Indians and other subject peoples placed at lower or ‘inferior’ positions in new ‘scales of civilization’, and the British (and Europeans generally) at the top. Indians were thereby condemned to continually try to catch up to their British rulers and ‘European civilization’, which claimed to be – and was widely accepted as – the universal or ‘silent referent’.