Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 337 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$35.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-05066-2
There is an old adage that “a week is a long time in politics,” and scholars are understandably rather cautious about predicting future political trends. At the time that this book was written, however, the strong statement made by Sumantra Bose, that “Coalition governments in New Delhi are a certainty for the foreseeable future” (109), would have seemed unexceptional to most observers of Indian politics. The Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government was mired in corruption scandals, and seemed to lack decisive leadership, but the principal alternative party at the national level, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with leadership problems of its own, had failed to offer convincing opposition. So, looking forward from early-mid 2013 to the general elections of the following year, it appeared more or less certain that the post-election alignments of strongly supported regional political parties would determine the character of the next central government of India, as they had done since the mid-1990s. Bose and others could not have anticipated the dramatic consequences of the BJP’s decision in September 2013 that Narendra Modi would be its candidate for the position of prime minister. Modi led an extraordinary, presidential-style campaign, backed with massive financial resources, and the BJP won an absolute majority in May 2014. Bose’s further strong statement, that “the era of nationwide leaders is definitively in the past” (293) has also been falsified, for Modi continues to dominate Indian national politics in a way matched by no other leader since the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. The general election that followed her death was also the last time that the electorate delivered an absolute majority to a single party.
But does the apparent falsification of his analysis of the political trends that are shaping India today mean that Bose’s book is now of little value? Almost certainly not, because the regionally based political parties that he believes to underlie the transformation of India’s democracy—the subject of the book—have not gone away as a result of Modi’s great victory. It is not at all unlikely that regional political leaders will once again hold the balance of power at the national level. Bose’s central argument, which draws some inspiration, explicitly and implicitly, from the work of Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph, is that India has become a “decentred democracy.” In his words: “The bottom-up federalization of India’s politics in the post-Congress era—an evolution rooted in the nation’s diversity and driven by the will of its people [through their support for regional parties]—means that the lives of the vast majority of Indians will be shaped by the dominant feature of India’s decentred democracy in the early twenty-first century: regionalization and regionalisms” (109). The argument is developed through an engagingly written account, in the first two chapters of the book, of the history of Indian politics since Independence, focusing especially on the significance of what was going on at the state level. This is followed by three chapters, each one of which stands more or less on its own, taking up specific themes: the history of democracy in the state of West Bengal; the story of the challenge posed to Indian democracy by the Maoists, who are organized in “a loose, possibly unstable federation of regional movements” (222) across a swathe of territory in the centre and east of the country; and finally a chapter on the “Kashmir Question” (on which Bose wrote a fine earlier book, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003]). A short conclusion looks to the future of India’s democracy as a “full-blooded federation of state-based polities” (296), in which much will depend on how regional leaders perform. Can they provide competent governance? Can they adopt a national perspective when it is needed? Can they together forge consensual decision making (or in a term familiar from Spain and Latin America, realize concertacion)? These are indeed critically important questions for India’s future. The auguries are decidedly mixed. Regional leaders have not so far shown much inclination for concertacion or for taking a national perspective. On the other hand, as Bose says, “the most intelligent of the state-based elected leaders” (293), like Mr. Modi in his earlier avatar as the long-term chief minister of Gujarat, have shown an increasing concern for demonstrating their performance in implementing strategic programs, instead of ruling through patronage.
Transforming India is neither a contemporary history comparable with Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi (London: Pan Macmillan, 2007), nor a thorough-going work of political science such as Atul Kohli’s Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). It runs the risk, therefore, of falling between two stools. The core argument is an important one, though it seems to this reader, at least, to be somewhat one-sided, paying too little attention to questions of political economy. In this regard Indian federalism remains quite strongly centralized. The “federation of state-based polities” that India is becoming is perhaps less “full-blooded” than Bose suggests. His book is, nonetheless, a stimulating and distinctive addition to the wave of publications about the “new India.”
John Harriss
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada