Political science today

DEMOCRACY IN INDIA: Niraja Gopal Jayal - Editor _ Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, Post Box No. 43, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 750.

WRITING A book is easy but editing a volume is very difficult. There has been a proliferation of edited volumes in recent times in social sciences, many of them are an assorted collection of hotchpotch material, and recycled papers presented at seminars. The organisation men of the seminars, eager to see their names in print, get them published through spurious publishers. This is an unhealthy practice, leading to a Graesham's law in book industry.

This volume, on the contrary, stands as a model and shows to the intellectual community, what an edited volume is and should be. The theme is well chosen, the papers are excellently picked up from eminent scholars and from the editorial note to the annotated bibliography, it is indeed a tough task and a real intellectual exercise. ``The theme in politics series presents essays on important issues in Indian political science and politics, contemporary political theory, Indian social and political thought and foreign policy, among others. Each volume in the series brings together the most significant articles and debates on each issue and contains a substantive introduction and an annotated bibliography''.

The note from Rajeev Bhargava and Partha Chatterjee, general editors to the series, explains the objectives, nature and scope of the volume as follows: ``Teaching of politics in India has long suffered because of the systematic unavailability of readers with the best contemporary work on the subject. The most significant writing in Indian politics and Indian political thought is scattered in periodicals; much of the recent work in contemporary political theory is to be found in inaccessible international journals or in collections that reflect more the current temper of Western universities than the need of Indian politics and society. The main objective of this series is to remove this lacuna. The series also attempts to cover as comprehensively and usefully as possible the main themes of contemporary research and public debate on politics, to include selections from the writings of leading specialists in each field, and to reflect the diversity of research methods, ideological concerns, and intellectual styles that characterise the discipline of political science today.''

The editor has done a superman's job in getting the volume in a perfect and flawless manner. His 45-page introduction to the theme is well conceived and lucidly written which takes him to higher levels of intellectual horizon. Yet he is modest and humble in stating that it is primarily meant for students. In the opening paragraph of the introduction to this excellent volume, he writes, "for anything that has ever been said about Indian democracy, there is a good chance that its opposite has also been asserted. If some have described democracy in India as an anomaly, others have seen it as an ideal case for testing democratic theory. If there are those who marvel at its resilience and endurance, there are also those who see it as hopelessly fragile. If some are impressed by the multiple levels and forms of participation, others regard this as a mask that conceals the reality of unequal access. Indeed, if there is, in the study of Indian politics, any single issue that remains unvaryingly contentious, and on which there are as many verdicts as there are scholars, it is surely the complex trajectory of India's 50-year experiment with this unique political form''.

Dr. Jayal has scanned the entire literature on the subject and had verily gone to Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle, Aristophanes - Viscount Bryce, Alexis De Tocqueville, Giovanni Sartor and horde of thinkers for his introduction. Perhaps the sum total of this long exercise reminds one of Barnard Crick's statement that "Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of politics''. Dr. Jayal, while assessing the working of Democracy in India for the last 50 years comes to the conclusion as follows. "One plausible way of attempting this is to invoke the distinction, posited at the beginning of this chapter, between procedural and substantive democracy, and evaluate the performance of India's democracy on the major indices that each of these encompasses. Doing so might help us to appreciate why Indian democracy is neither an unqualified success nor an unmitigated failure. It has undoubtedly scored some remarkable successes, but it continues also to be trapped within the confines of oppressive social structures and economic inequalities that prevent its full potential from being realised. The project of democracy today is both fragile and beleaguered.''

The book is divided into six parts, the structure and layout are superbly done. There are 17 papers, written by eminent men, and grouped under appropriate headings. One need not and cannot endorse or accept all that has been said in these papers, as they have been said by scholars belonging to diverse ethno-economic and socio-political background and standing. In the article "Democracy under the Raj'' James Chiriyankandath tells the Indian audience that "Nationalist politicians and scholars have sought to trace the roots of India's democratic system back to antiquity - to the sabhas and samitis referred to in the Rig Veda in the second millennium B.C. However, while this ancient legacy has been utilised to impart an indigenous legitimacy to the representative institutions of modern India, the more tangible legacy has been the colonial one.''

Rajni Kothari in his paper, "The crisis of the modern state'', hypothesises that "It is not surprising that in large parts of the world, liberal democracy, faced by internal turmoil and external challenge, or simply through the opportunism, ficklemindedness, or vaingloriousness of leaders, has been overwhelmed. Indeed what is surprising is that despite such a confluence of historical forces liberal democracy continues to survive both as a form of human governance and even more - as a value system that continues to remain steadfast for millions of people.''

Jayal, in his paper, "The State and Democracy in India'' feels that secularism has increasingly been under threat as communal ideology and political forces have come to enjoy greater purchase in society and polity. After all one should not forget that in a land of illiteracy and squalor, a written constitution, pronouncing democracy is an anachronism. People get the government they deserve. In Indian democracy, people choose, and often times, set a thief to catch a thief.

In his essay, "The puzzle of Indian Democracy'' Arend Lijphart wrote in the APSR and quoted in this volume states "India has long been a puzzle for students of comparative democratic politics. Its success in maintaining democratic rule since independence in 1947 (excluding the brief authoritarian interlude of the 1975-77 Emergency) in the world's largest and most heterogenous democracy runs counter to John Stuart Mills' (1958:230)''.

The publishers deserve congratulations for their neat and clean job. The book will be of much use to people curious to know about India.

C.A. PERUMAL

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