The Telegraph, 26 January 2012

For some veteran watchers, the rolling battle tanks, the soaring strike aircraft, the colours of state tableaux, and the march-pasts of the Republic Day parade may appear ritualistic. But social science scholars and psychologists say the annual pageantry, even in its seventh decade, has spin-offs for the nation and individuals.

The celebrations and the symbols, they say, contribute to a bond towards the nation-state and, as recent research reveals, may even add to a sense of wellbeing and happiness.

The Republic Day continues to be an occasion to remind Indians to move beyond their inherited or ascribed identities such as caste or religion, or language or region and reaffirm their commitment to constitutional values, said a researcher who specialises in post-colonial studies and national identity.

It’s a way to seek uncompromising commitment to constitutional values crucial to sustain this diverse and pluralistic nation, said Sarbeswar Sahoo, assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, currently a Humboldt Fellow at the Max-Weber-Centre at the University of Erfurt, Germany.

“This is still an event that people wait for — and enjoy,” said Aruna Pendse, associate professor of civics and politics at the University of Mumbai. “It should be seen as a celebration of our democracy and our diversity, something intended to bolster national pride,” she said.

National pride, as recent studies suggest, can keep people happy. A study by psychologists Ed Diener, Louis Tay and Mike Morrison at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, last year found that feeling good about a country increases a sense of personal wellbeing.

Their research, published in the journal Psychological Science, shows that people who feel proud to be a member of their country are also happier than those who don’t feel affiliated to their nation-state. Their study, based on a poll of 1000 people from 128 countries also showed that this association was far stronger among people with low incomes and people from poor countries than among people from the industrialised nations.

But just how much national pride actually translates into happiness may depend on how a person defines nationalism. Research published last month has shown that the level of happiness is influenced by whether an individual is a “civic nationalist” or an “ethnic nationalist”.

Sociologist Tim Reeskens at the Catholic University of Belgium and Matthew Wright, a political scientist at the American University in the US, examined the association of happiness with national pride among 40,600 people from 31 European countries. But they split the idea of national pride into two categories — civic nationalism, an inclusive concept that requires only respect for a nation’s institutions and laws, and ethnic nationalism that insists on ancestry or blood ties to a nation.

Their study, also published in the journal Psychological Science, found that the greater the national pride, the greater the sense of well-being. But civic nationalists were happier than ethnic nationalists.

“The most happy were the respondents who were proud of their countries and were civic nationalists, while the least happy were people who were not proud of their country and thought about their country mainly in ethnic terms,” Reeskens told The Telegraph.

But even the proudest ethnic nationalists, the study has revealed, had a sense of wellbeing that barely surpassed the sense of well-being of people with the lowest level of civic pride.

The relevance of these results to India is still unclear. But, Reeskens said, the findings relating to the ethnic nationalism were stable across countries and may apply in India. But while the (Republic Day) celebrations are likely to foster a stronger national identity, the social science scholar points out, what is still unclear is whether these celebrations and the symbols will promote an inclusive civic identity or an exclusive ethnic one.

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@ http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120126/jsp/nation/story_15055134.jsp

]]> http://sahoo.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/not-just-bluster-spectacle-helps/feed/ 0 sarbeswarnus http://sahoo.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/globalization-and-democratic-politics-in-india/ http://sahoo.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/globalization-and-democratic-politics-in-india/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:31:43 +0000 sarbeswarnus http://sahoo.wordpress.com/?p=308 ]]> The paper addresses two basic questions in the globalization literature: is globalization a threat or an opportunity?; and how far does market deepening actually encourage genuine substantive democracy in the world? Many scholars have argued that globalization has resulted in increasing inequality and marginalization of the poor, which is not conducive for democracy. Drawing on the case of India, this paper, however, argues that the rolling back of the welfare state and the demise of developmentalism led to the mobilization of the masses against the elitist and exploitative agenda of globalization. As a result, a counter-hegemonic vibrant civil society has emerged, which challenges the hegemony of the elites and channels the empowerment agenda of the subaltern groups. This new politics of the subaltern is grounded on the idea of social justice and citizenship rights, which is redefining the nature of the Indian state and democracy.

“A century ago”, so Toby E. Huff observes in the introduction of his monograph, “when it was not thought to be insensitive to ask big questions about how the world had gotten to be the way it is, the German sociologist Max Weber laid out his thoughts about these profound questions. […] [H]e concluded that there were a number of striking intellectual features that arose only in the West and yet had a universal significance, a global impact as we would say today” (p. 11). The statement tells in a nutshell what Huff’s book is all about: It is overly optimistic about the importance of Western civilization and openly places itself in a direct tradition of nineteenth century thinking. In writing a history of natural science, Huff thus disregards more than a century – that is, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, Huff presents an interpretation of globalization that is stunningly outdated in its overall message.

At the core of the problem stand Huff’s preface and introduction to “Intellectual Curiosity”, which are mostly polemics. They seem to prepare the reader for a monograph that does not engage in a debate because it neglects to present and to discuss alternative views in an analytical, scholarly-scientific manner. Maybe the reason for that is the fact that Huff is an astronomer and therefore has excellent knowledge of related inventions in the Western World in the course of the past centuries. He is, however, lacking a thoroughly systematic background both in the methods and in the most important lines of thinking in the humanities and social sciences after Max Weber. Huff is more at home in the chapters that make up the substance of his book, where he tries less to interpret in absolute, universal terms but to present his view of a Western-European scientific past as a series of path-breaking inventions centring on the telescope.

It is always misleading to study an isolated aspect of the past and present without a broader understanding of the contemporary times and contexts. In “Intellectual Curiosity”, Huff uncritically takes up hierarchical thinking from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century but applies present-day terminology such as the idea of a “globalized” world to it. While, however, claiming to be presenting a global perspective, Huff actually devotes very little space to comparing different world regions as he proposes to be doing: “I lay out the comparative tracks of scientific development and educational practice in Europe and in the three other great civilizations of the world: China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire” (p. 4, my emphasis). Instead, he bluntly argues that Western civilization is superior to other civilizations, for example: “[T]he European contribution far exceeded that of all the other peoples and civilizations of the globe” (p. 8) – yet no other civilization is analysed in depth as an actual basis for a comparison. Part II of the book is spent on this proposed comparison. It is made up of one chapter spanning no more than 22 pages (pp. 145-167). The book is thus oddly out of balance with its altogether three parts – part I and III discussing in five to six chapters, respectively, the history mainly of natural sciences in “the West”.

Presenting a single-minded idea of the ways of the world, Huff dangerously downplays the long-standing tradition of Western imperialism and its more or less open racism by focusing exclusively on the positive outcomes of Western science, leaving out the suffering and devastation that many inventions throughout the past centuries have caused as well. While he delights in the invention of the telescope as a key incident to Western (and thus, in Huff’s view, the world’s) progress, he blends out that while indeed, much good came of the intellectual curiosity of people such as Galileo Galilei (whose name, thanks to his invention of the telescope, guides the reader like a red thread through the book), it also meant death and devastation for others. Telescopes and other, earlier devices had made the great tours of discovery possible and safer. As a result, ever since Christopher Columbus’ historic voyage in 1492, Europeans had gathered information about all possible (not just natural) sciences in other parts of the world. But these voyages of discovery thanks to great European inventions also brought about devastation, such as when European plagues were introduced to foreign continents, killing natives there by the thousands. More recently, atomic power has turned into a danger capable of destroying the human race even in its “peaceful” forms of application.

It is hardly possible to continue with the cheerfully optimistic progressivism of the turn of the twentieth century today without also discussing the horrific downsides of Western science. Ironically, some of these downsides are rooted in the fact that scientific thinking was considered to be the ultimate achievement within the realm of intellectual culture. But the absence of moral thinking or openness to alternative viewpoints beyond one’s own accustomed universe will increasingly have to be remarried to the natural sciences. Part of that would be to acknowledge that in studying the past, more is needed than an astronomer’s personal optimism about his specific discipline’s impact on the rest of the world and its civilizations. Studying the past of the natural sciences also necessitates that one arrives at a more profound understanding of the societies at the time when those past discoveries were made.

Huff does refer to “the three other great civilizations of the world” (p. 4). But this cannot be called a systematic approach to comparing great civilizations: Are China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire all the world ever saw in terms of highly developed cultures? And if these three are singled out, why they and not for example ancient Egypt? Or the native American civilizations like the Inca and Maya? Huff presents his three great civilizations as indubitable facts for which no further explanations appear to be needed. But what are his parameters for defining a civilization? Apparently, a great civilization equals the Western world, though even when looking at Huff’s “western civilization”, the focus tends to shift ever so often. In the beginning of his preface, it refers to New England exclusively, thus hinting at the old myth that the South of the United States is intellectual inferior; Huff mentions colony building in today’s Maine by “a hardy brand of English settlers” (ix).[1] After that, Huff remains undecided between Europe and North America as his focal point, depending on what time period he has in mind. Apparently, Huff considers North America a product of Europe that by the time of the twentieth century had outgrown its master. Moreover, according to Huff, America (or rather New England?!) experienced only insignificant and thus negligible input from other world regions such as Africa, Asia, or South America.[2]

It seems entirely acceptable for those of other disciplines to claim a say in the humanities without ever reading up thoroughly on recent scholarship in those fields. Maybe that is because at some point in the course of the twentieth century, we lost sight of the fact that “science and technology” cannot be without the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, “scire”, the Latin verb that is the root of English “science”, means simply “to know.” In ancient Greece – one civilization that does not figure officially in Huff’s book as a separate great civilization, although he does mention it in passing as more significant than any of the three “inferior” ones such as “China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire” (p. 8) – arts and sciences were irrevocably intertwined. The astronomer Huff presents us with an unreflecting view of the exclusive “blessings” of a somewhat hazy notion of “Western” science and technology that does not do justice to the idea of a “globalized perspective” on the history of science.

Notes:
[1] See for example Anja Becker, Southern Academic Ambitions Meet German Scholarship: The Leipzig Networks of Vanderbilt University’s James H. Kirkland in the Late Nineteenth Century, in: The Journal of Southern History 74/4 (2008), pp. 855-86; John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education, Baltimore 2004; Dan R. Frost, Thinking Confederates: Academia and the Idea of Progress in the New South, Knoxville 2000.
[2] Just one example of reinterpreting colonial black intellectualism and the influence of the African diaspora on European culture in the past would be James H. Sweet, Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingo Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora, in: The American Historical Review 114/2 (2009), pp. 279-306. See also Laurent DuBois / Julius C. Scott (eds.), Origins of the Black Atlantic, New York 2010.

Written over a period of almost three decades, Democracy and Development in India is an outstanding collection of essays by Atul Kohli which discuss the paradigm of development and democracy as well as the changing relationship between the state and capital in India from a historical perspective. The essays show that over the last three decades the state and the ruling class in India have abandoned socialist ideology and have instead enthusiastically embraced a pro-capitalist neo-liberal ethos and practices which have had ‘negative implications for pursuing redistributive policies in India’ (p. 14). Following the Weberian state–society and comparative frame of analysis, the essays in this collection advocate a social democratic model of development where economic growth is accompanied by redistributive reforms and social justice.

The book has fifteen essays divided along three themes: political change, political economy and uneven regional development. In the first part, the essays discuss the complex dynamics of political change and power management in India. According to Kohli, the hegemonic ‘Congress system’, which provided political stability by accommodating diverse ethnic and regional interests and helped consolidate socialist democracy during the Nehru period, began to decline during the period of Indira Gandhi, whose ‘personalistic and populistic politics’ weakened India’s democratic institutions (p. 7). With this, various ethnic and regional political parties began to emerge, which resulted not only in the ‘growing fragmentation’ (p. 9) of political society but also in increasing political instability in India.

The second part of the book discusses ‘the political determinants of growth and distributional patterns in India’ (p. 105). Kohli explains the growth upsurge in India as ‘a product, not of liberal policies adopted in 1991, but of a growing state–capital alliance’ (p. 13) that began around 1980. Although this alliance has accelerated economic growth, it simultaneously widened inequality across classes and regions of India. In the final part, Kohli employs a comparative analysis of the various types of Indian state – neo-patrimonial (Bihar), social democratic (West Bengal) and developmental (Gujarat) – and the politics of regional development, and concludes that a ‘parliamentary-communist’ or ‘social democratic’ regime provides the best hope ‘for facilitating redistribution within the framework of
democratic capitalism’ (p. 249).

The essays are well argued, theoretically original and amply substantiated by empirical evidence. The only problem, however, is that most of these essays were written long ago and have not been updated. Today’s India is very different from that of the 1980s. Despite this, the volume’s use of comparative methodology and state–society analysis makes it an important contribution to the literature on political sociology and comparative politics.
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Note: Reviewed by S. Sahoo in Political Studies Review, September 2011

Consider the state first. It is becoming apparent to everyone that the Indian state has several tools at its disposal to regulate and curb protest. No one denies that the state needs to regulate certain forms of protest for logistical purposes or law and order. But it is now clear that the state regulates protest to an unconscionable degree, remnant of a licence-permit raj. The idea that the capital does not have a space where large numbers of people can, of their own free will, assemble is a travesty of democracy. The Delhi Police’s requirement that the number of protesters be specified in advance or limited to 5,000 is absurd. Coming after the eviction of thousands of supporters of another farcical movement headed by Baba Ramdev, this portends a dangerous trend. There is no evidence yet that any of these movements intended violence or incited any criminality.

“If we don’t have a right to protest, we don’t have anything at all.” These words were uttered by none other than Law Minister Salman Khursheed, criticising Mayawati’s use of Section 144 to curb protest. The irony of this should not be missed. The Congress feels entitled to walk into a state and rabble-rouse in a situation that was actually violent; but it will use every bureaucratic means at its disposal to thwart protest. Its integrity is compromised right there; and its ability to pre-empt movements through the use of state power should frighten those committed to a liberal democracy. We don’t see too many protest movements because the state is, oddly enough, quite effective in pre-empting them.

Add to this the fact that the state’s attitude is bordering on thuggishness. In Ramdev’s case, the state used its machinery to go after the movement, after the fact. Congress spokespersons have been articulating veiled threats of this kind at movements that oppose the government. This threat is being circulated in a wide range of cases, including Jagan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh. And the Congress is no longer disguising the fact that it will use its state power to discredit any movement it finds inconvenient. Whatever the excesses of the Anna movement, the aggression of the Congress party is a matter of worry: the way it holds out threats, uses innuendo, concocts any argument that suits it. The need of the hour is some statesmanship, not bullies fighting to the finish. Whether or not the charges it pursues are plausible has become moot. The state’s timing and selectivity in doing so is only compromising its credibility. Make no mistake about it: the Congress will use any state power it can to protect itself and intimidate opponents. This issue will require vigilant social action.

The Anna Hazare movement meanwhile continues to propagate the tyranny of virtue. It has elided the distinction between protest and fast-unto-death. The former is legitimate. The latter is blackmail. Second, it has elided the fact that this is not just a contest between two players, the state and the knights in shining armour of the movement. There are many other actors in civil society who disagree with their institutional proposals. By threatening a fast-unto-death, they are violating two norms of democratic society. First, they are not acknowledging that there can be legitimate differences in a democracy. And to insist that only one proposal is correct is to slight not the state but other citizens. Second, they are violating the norms of reciprocity. Their sense of virtue cannot entitle them to deny that other citizens are also making good-faith arguments to better our democracy. And in the case of a disagreement, we have to resort to the only adjudicative mechanism we have agreed on: our representative democracy.

The movement should learn from its own success so far. The significance of actors in a democracy is always complex. Often movements achieve good despite themselves; and often they produce more destruction despite noble intentions. The Hazare movement has done both. The aims of the movement embodied in the Lokpal bill are ridiculous. But it has to be acknowledged that it galvanised a consciousness on the issue of corruption. Social pressure is important. The movement should also recognise that various other institutions of the state, from the opposition to independent bodies, have, albeit imperfectly, swung into action. The game is beginning to change. But it should not destroy its own historical achievement by being unreasonable on the methods of protest, or the choice of institutions it supports.

There is also a danger that the moral climate being created by Manichean worldviews of good versus evil will ill serve the cause of justice. It is already becoming apparent that even other institutions like the court are succumbing to this view. The court’s attitude on the denial of bail to the 2G accused at various levels has less the imprimatur of the rule of law. It seems to be borne out of a fear that its legitimacy will be immediately questioned in this atmosphere that recognises no shades of gray, no fine distinctions, no patience with forms. Civil society should not contribute to this frenzy, lest it itself become the victim.

One hopes that the continuing farce will not end in tragedy. All actors in the current system, whether it is the executive, courts, independent agencies or civil society, will serve society better by discharging their proper roles, not by extending their power on any pretext. We need a fine balance, not an insolent civil society or a tyrannical state.

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Written by: Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Time to Step back”, Indian Express, 16 August 2011.

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Source: David Brewster (2010) “India’s Developing Relationship with South Korea: A Useful Friend in East Asia,” Asian Survey, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 402-425.

Ha-Joon Chang – Kicking Away the Ladder

In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis charts the unprecedented human suffering caused by a series of extreme climactic conditions in the final quarter of the 19th century. Drought and monsoons afflicted much of China, southern Africa, Brazil, Egypt and India. The death tolls were staggering: around 12m Chinese and over 6m Indians in 1876-1878 alone. The chief culprit, according to Davis, was not the weather, but European empires, with Japan and the US. Their imposition of free-market economics on the colonial world was tantamount to a “cultural genocide”.

These are strong words. Yet it’s hard to disagree with them after reading Davis’s harrowing book. Development economists have long argued that drought need not lead to famine; well-stocked inventories and effective distribution can limit the damage. In the 19th century, however, drought was treated, particularly by the English in India, as an opportunity for reasserting sovereignty.

A particular villain was Lord Lytton, son of the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (“It was a dark and stormy night…”) after whom, today, a well-known bad writing prize is named. During 1876 Lytton, widely suspected to be insane, ignored all efforts to alleviate the suffering of millions of peasants in the Madras region and concentrated on preparing for Queen Victoria’s investiture as Empress of India. The highlight of the celebrations was a week-long feast of lucullan excess at which 68,000 dignitaries heard her promise the nation “happiness, prosperity and welfare”.

Lytton believed in free trade. He did nothing to check the huge hikes in grain prices, Economic “modernization” led household and village reserves to be transferred to central depots using recently built railroads. Much was exported to England, where there had been poor harvests. Telegraph technology allowed prices to be centrally co-ordinated and, inevitably, raised in thousands of small towns. Relief funds were scanty because Lytton was eager to finance military campaigns in Afghanistan. Conditions in emergency camps were so terrible that some peasants preferred to go to jail. A few, starved and senseless, resorted to cannibalism. This was all of little consequence to many English administrators who, as believers in Malthusianism, thought that famine was nature’s response to Indian over-breeding.

It used to be that the late 19th century was celebrated in every school as the golden period of imperialism. While few of us today would defend empire in moral terms, we’ve long been encouraged to acknowledge its economic benefits. Yet, as Davis points out, “there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947″. In Egypt, too, the financial difficulties caused to peasants by famine encouraged European creditors to override the millennia-old tradition that tenancy was guaranteed for life. What little relief aid reached Brazil, meanwhile, ended up profiting British merchant houses and the reactionary sugar-planter classes.

The European “locusts” did not go unchallenged. Rioting became common. Banditry increased. In China, drought-famine helped to spark the Boxer uprising. In Europe, the fin de siècle was largely an opportunity for pale-faced men to wear purple cummerbunds and spout rotten symbolist poetry; for colonized peoples it genuinely seemed to presage mass extinction. It was, says Davis, “a new dark age of colonial war, indentured labour, concentration camps, genocide, forced migration, famine and disease.”

Davis’s attention to the importance of environment may recall the work of the Annales school of historians, but he is far more radical than any of them. His writing, both here and in such classic books as City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, is closer to that of Latin American intellectuals such as Ariel Dorfman and the Urguayan, Eduardo Galaeno, who for decades have spotlighted capitalism’s casual abuse of the third world and who have sought to champion the poor and dispossessed. Such commitment, forcefully and lucidly expressed, is unfashionable these days.

“Class” may be passé in academic circles, yet the catalogue of cruelty Davis has unearthed is jaw-dropping. A friend to whom I lent the book was reduced to tears by it. Late Victorian Holocausts is as ugly as it is compelling. But, as Conrad’s Marlow said in Heart of Darkness : “The conquest of the earth, which means the taking away from those who have a different complexion and slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much.”

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@  Sukhdev Sandhu, The Guardian, Saturday 20 January 2001

Poverty, Participation, and Democracy, which grew out of a workshop organized atDukeUniversity in 2006, brings together six brilliant papers by renowned scholars from different disciplines. The central question addressed here is, what is the relationship between poverty and democracy? The classic studies on democracy by S.M. Lipset, Barrington Moore and Samuel Huntington have all shown that there exists a negative correlation between poverty and the development of democracy. Their works also suggest that “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy”. However, by building on historical experiences and examples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the authors of this volume argue that “poor people do not value democracy any less than their richer counterparts” (p.9). Their observations show that it is the educational level of people, rather than wealth and income that provide a positive correlation with the emergence and consolidation of democratic political regimes.

This book has six chapters. The introductory essay byKrishnasets the context for the book and outlines its main arguments. He provides empirical evidence that challenges the conventional wisdom, which advocates that “democracy tends to be stronger in richer rather than poorer countries” (p.7) and poor people participate much less than others in various democratic activities. The Indian case provides a fitting example where the poor participate more intensely than the rich in the electoral democratic process; democracy has not only survived inIndiabut also has become sturdier over the last six decades amid unfavorable conditions like high levels of poverty and illiteracy.

Increasing participation by the poor in the democratic process is also shown to have occurred in Africa and Latin America. Bratton as well as Booth and Seligson find that the major cause for this is the increase in education and political awareness among the people. Przeworski argues that it is not the poor but the rich and their fear for “redistribution” that threatens the viability of democracy. In order for democracy to become more firmly consolidated within the poorer countries, Krishna and Booth argue in the concluding chapter that  middle-level “institution building” should be encouraged as they will not just provide viable means of representation for the poor but also will make the “everyday practices of governance” accountable and transparent (p.152).

The book suffers from three shortcomings. First, building institutions does not always strengthen democracy since institutions do not have, as Hadiz (2010) notes, “a life of their own that is independent of context”. They could be dominated by predatory interests that might undermine democratic governance. Secondly, there is no discussion on globalization, which is intimately related to poverty and democracy. Finally, the chapters look repetitive as they all use Lipset’s work as the basis of their discussion. Despite this, the volume’s methodological sophistication and theoretically insightful essays will be a significant contribution to the students of political sociology and comparative politics.

Note: Reviewed by Sahoo. S. (2011) in Political Studies Review, Vol. 9, pp. 258-259.

Source: Sahoo, S. “Political Mobilisation, the Poor and Democratisation in Neo-liberal India,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 40, No. 3, August 2010, pp. 487–508