Durham: Duke University Press, 2023. US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781478020776.
This book examines how democracy enables and shapes violent political conflict in India, something explored by earlier studies but upon which this present book does not draw (e.g., Myron Weiner, The Indian Paradox, Sage, 1989). Here the author, Ruchi Chaturvedi, argues that representative democracy encourages majoritarianism—of a party, its cadre, and supporters—a claim mainly true where first-past-the post electoral rules exist, and could privilege the ethnic or religious majority. It always promotes partisan conflict and, she claims more questionably, its frequently violent expression. Chaturvedi examines these phenomena in Kannur district, Kerala, a state known for maintaining India’s highest levels of basic and secondary education, and most extensive property redistribution and welfare provision.
Despite the main Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party never polling more than 15 percent in state elections, the movement organization from which it arose, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has enjoyed widespread growth since the 1940s in parts of Kerala and since the late 1960s in Kannur. Chaturvedi focuses on violent conflicts between the RSS and the strongest electoral communist party, the Communist Party of India-Marxist, and how courts construct criminal law in the associated cases. Kannur being the study’s sole site despite the RSS’s later growth there isn’t explained and is perhaps due to its high partisan violence since the 1980s.
Chaturvedi claims, without evidence, that these conflicts involved organizational subcultures without ethno-religious dimensions. This is contrary to Muslims and Christians being barely present among RSS cadre as the organization marginalizes and turns periodically violent towards them, even while some tactically voted for the BJP recently in states where it is strong. The partisanship of Muslims and Christians matters more in Kerala, where they make up 45.2 percent of the population, and Kannur, where they make up 39.8 percent, compared to 16.5 percent throughout India, circumstances the author ignores. In Kerala, they divide their votes between small parties solely representing them, and the Congress and communist parties. This makes the religious backgrounds of cadre engaged in the RSS-CPI(M) conflict different and sharpens the violence more than inter-organizational ideological contrasts themselves do. Moreover, Congress’s periodic engagement in violence with the state’s other strong party, CPI-M, is not mentioned.
The BJP’s electoral performance remained weak in Kerala, while rising rapidly since the 2010s in various states without prior Hindu nationalist strength: West Bengal, Manipur, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Telangana. Chaturvedi leaves the large gap between Hindu nationalist electoral and organizational importance in Kerala unaddressed although it influenced how the state government engaged party conflict. Indeed, she says little about electoral performance although she emphasizes electoral democracy as violence’s cauldron. Her brief references are riddled with errors: for example, the claim that in the first postcolonial elections, the CPI and its coalitions won the most seats in Madras, Hyderabad, and Travancore-Cochin (44). Contrariwise, the Congress outpolled the CPI in all three regions. In Madras, Congress won 152 seats based on polling 34.9 percent of the vote to the CPI’s 62 (13.2 percent); in Hyderabad, Congress won 93 seats (41.9 percent) to the CPI’s 42 (20.8 percent); and in Travancore-Cochin, Congress won 44 seats (35.4 percent), to the Independents (including the banned CPI’s candidates) 37 (33.9 percent).
The book draws primarily on postcolonial theory, and secondarily other diverse social and ethico-legal theorists without integrating them into an interpretive/explanatory scheme. It rightly rejects the outdated equation of studying non-Western societies with area studies but claims inspiration solely from authors who examine India in isolation. For instance, Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and Its Fragments,Princeton University Press, 1993) theorizes about all postcolonial societies based on a study of Bengal alone, failing thereby to contrast settler from non-settler colonies, those with strong nationalist movements (e.g., Indonesia, Algeria) from those without (e.g., Nigeria, Morocco), and those where democracy (albeit flawed) existed for a long time (e.g., India, Jamaica) from those where it did not (e.g., Vietnam, Paraguay). More instructive would have been the extensive literature that places a society in a global perspective, compares a few countries or parts of them, or offers broad overviews of many countries. The first two types of work combine documentary research, interviews, multi-sited ethnography, sample surveys, and statistically generated inferences.
While she did conduct documentary research, Chaturvedi does not indicate trends inferred therefrom, notably from the 250 court case files she consulted, leaving it unclear if the two cases narrated in detail represent these patterns. That both cases concerned RSS violence on CPI(M) cadre makes them unrepresentative as there was considerable reciprocal violence. Moreover, her interviews would have been restricted by her reportedly minimal interaction with activists (110), unusual in a study heavily reliant on ethnography, contrary to which she extensively discusses some activist interviews. The constrained interaction, perhaps due to her admittedly limited Malayalam requiring reliance on translated interview and documentary texts, no doubt restricted her sensitivity to the mentalities of her interviewees. Some of the above-mentioned methods might have helped her compare Kannur with the rest of Kerala, and other regions in India and elsewhere with varied violence levels, to draw more robust conclusions regarding when high partisan violence persists. The book does not clarify how a regime’s democratic character shapes partisan violence (despite its title and iterative pronouncements) as similar violence is common in one-party autocracies facing mass protest and insurgent resistance, and the hybrid regimes that institutions such as the Varieties of Democracy Institute, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Freedom House assessed to have existed in India over the past few years.
Echoing Marx and Engels, Chaturvedi decries the communist prioritization of legislative power as “parliamentary cretinism.” This too readily transports interventions in contexts of limited franchise and legislative dependence on authoritative monarchs, to popular democracies introduced by mass-based nationalist movements, with universal franchise, and ultimate legislative and executive authority. The latter circumstances have left few feasible alternatives to promote extensive and durable redistribution other than the electoral participation that most communists embraced from the first parliamentary elections, reinforced by non-electoral mobilizations. Insurgent communists cultivated support in the 1990s and 2000s in less accessible pockets, but their influence was reversed through state repression.
Based on colonial legacies, criminal courts focus on individual intention independent of social context and characterize certain tribes and lower castes as habitually criminal (116–117, 120). This depoliticizes the adjudication of partisan violence, makes privileged individuals unlikely to be deemed guilty unless they are considered dangerous dissenters, and enables the acquittal of many whose violence is established unless they fit offender stereotypes. Chaturvedi correctly connects this to hegemonic nationalism identifying upper Hindu castes as normative citizens under Congress and increasingly under BJP rule (119–121). Hindu nationalists also victimized Muslim men, and one might add, members of evangelical churches, which are experiencing growth among the disadvantaged. References to democracies empowering hegemonic masculinity remain unestablished and, along with the nuanced discussion of criminal jurisprudence, unlinked to Kannur’s experiences.
Despite scattered observations of interest, the study lacks convincing conceptualization, methodologies suited to answer its central question, deep empirical investigation, and systematic exposition.
Narendra Subramanian
McGill University, Montreal