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RETHINKING DEMOCRACY. by Rajni Kothari. London and New York

Rajni Kothari's book Rethinking Democracy argues that Indian democracy has declined as the state has been captured by national elites and powerful institutions abroad, leaving the poor without political, economic, or social opportunities. Kothari advocates for decentralizing governance to grassroots organizations and popular participation to address contemporary ills. However, his description of India's political trajectory and the state's failure to help the poor are only partially convincing. While his emphasis on strengthening grassroots movements is suggestive, he remains vague on specific measures and institutions needed to democratize India. The book provides a compelling summary of Kothari's work but falls short of a roadmap for a more democratic Indian polity.

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RETHINKING DEMOCRACY. by Rajni Kothari. London and New York

Rajni Kothari's book Rethinking Democracy argues that Indian democracy has declined as the state has been captured by national elites and powerful institutions abroad, leaving the poor without political, economic, or social opportunities. Kothari advocates for decentralizing governance to grassroots organizations and popular participation to address contemporary ills. However, his description of India's political trajectory and the state's failure to help the poor are only partially convincing. While his emphasis on strengthening grassroots movements is suggestive, he remains vague on specific measures and institutions needed to democratize India. The book provides a compelling summary of Kothari's work but falls short of a roadmap for a more democratic Indian polity.

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Amir
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Electronic Book Review: South Asia

RETHINKING DEMOCRACY. By Rajni Kothari. London and New York:


Zed Books, 2007. vii, 176 pp. US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-84277-946-0.

The twentieth century witnessed a remarkable shift in many countries from


authoritarian to democratic rule and a no-less-astounding move within many
older democracies towards more plural forms of political competition. Yet
this upsurge of formal democracy has often occurred in the absence of
a significant change in the distribution of political opportunities on the
ground. Rajni Kothari, one of India’s foremost political scientists, speaks
directly to this paradox in his new book, drawing together a lifetime of
observations on India’s changing political scene. Rethinking Democracy does
not always fulfill its promise, but it deserves to be read by all those interested
in political transformation, democracy, grassroots mobilization and social
justice in South Asia.
Central to the book is a story of India’s failed democratic state, situated
within a critique of European modernity. The outlines of this account will
be familiar to readers of Kothari’s prior work. He charts a decline in Indian
democracy from a period in which the state was putatively uninfluenced by
powerful sections of society, in the 1950s and 1960s, to an era in which the state
has been thoroughly captured by national elites and their associates among
the middle classes and powerful institutions abroad. Kothari characterizes
the contemporary era as one in which the state is manifestly incapable of
meeting the needs of the poor, economically, socially or politically, and in
which the worst excesses of consumer capitalism have been allowed free rein.
Kothari imagines an upsurge of reactionary forms of religious communal
violence as a consequence of this political and moral crisis. At the same time,
he emphasizes the emergence of powerful environmental, social justice and
women’s movements since the 1970s in India.
Kothari’s suggested remedy for contemporary ills is the decentralization
of governance to allow grassroots organizations greater power in the framing
of policy and planning. What Kothari has in mind is a radical revision of the
role of government in society that would include diminished party political
action, and widespread popular participation in the running of public affairs.
He also appeals for a reorientation of the educational process to provide
a more holistic understanding of the world and greater efforts to nurture
and connect grassroots social movements. Kothari repeatedly stresses the
importance of Indian traditions to this political drive. India requires “new
indigenous roots of sustenance and strength…based on genuine possibilities
of alternatives that can work” (48).
Kothari’s description of political crisis and plans for recuperating Indian
democracy are only partially convincing. His description of India’s political
trajectory arguably downplays the extent to which elites were able to shape
state policy in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, Kothari exaggerates the failure
of the state to counter problems of poverty in contemporary India. Social

  13
Pacific Affairs: Volume 83, No. 1 – Spring 2010

science research on the state in India published in the 1990s and 2000s has
shown that, even in the areas of India most profoundly affected by “elite
capture” and bureaucratic inefficiency, some benefits do arrive for the poor,
who are increasingly demanding the forms of “modernity” disparaged by
Kothari.
The author’s search for a new decentralized and participatory form of
democracy is more suggestive. Kothari’s emphasis on learning from multiple
grassroots organizations and strengthening non-party political forums
resonates with recent feminist and subaltern research in India. Moreover,
Kothari’s discussion of the capacity of middle classes to play brokerage roles
in networks of political assertion is timely, reversing a tendency in some
quarters to paint elites as inevitably self-serving. Towards the end of the book,
Kothari also develops an intriguing argument about the ability of subalterns
to expand our understanding of what constitutes the political. And yet, when
moved to outline specific measures that might democratize India, Kothari is
rather vague, falling back on general calls for greater civic social involvement
in governance and a decline in the role of the state.
Reviewing five volumes of Kothari’s work in this journal nearly twenty
years ago, Pratap Bhanu Mehta questioned whether Kothari’s Gandhian
emphasis on decentralized forms of governance was viable in the absence of
a better account of the type of institutions that could replace those associated
with Europe’s modernity (India’s Disordered Democracy, Pacific Affairs, vol.
64, no. 4, Winter 1991-1992, p. 548). Nearly twenty years on, I am left with
the same uncertainty. Rethinking Democracy falls short of providing a roadmap
for a more genuinely democratic Indian polity. But it remains a compelling
summary of the work of one of South Asia’s leading intellectuals and a
passionate appeal for a fairer, more inclusive India.

University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Craig Jeffrey

  14

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