Democracy Against Development: Lower Caste Politics, and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India by Jeffrey Witsoe (review)

Jeffrey Witsoe’s Democracy Against Development takes on the task of investigating “caste” as a determinative force in postcolonial Indian democracy. On one level, this appears a familiar project. Several others—concerned variously with colonial histories, enumerative representational practices, identitarian politics, and contemporary socio-political upheavals—have elaborated on “caste” as a contingent, variable, but nonetheless enduring dynamic of Indian governance (Bayly 1999; Dirks 1993, 2001; Reddy 2005). Such works establish the irrefutable modernity of caste: its constitution as a unified “system” through colonial governance and its consequent disassociation from politics and alliance with ritual and religion—which ironically provides rationalization for later political assertions demanding access to resources, representation, and rights. “Caste” becomes thus a powerful organizing element of contemporary Indian democracy, a “specifically postcolonial version of political society” (Dirks 2001:16). So vital are caste groups to contemporary electoral practice, and so unapologetically self-interested are their emergent political methods, that in popular analysis, too, it has become commonplace to reference caste metrics and mechanics (playing the “caste card,” considering the “caste equation”) as indicators of interest-driven politics-as-usual, all enacted at the expense of the rationalist, liberal Indian state. The scene is one of complete disarray: violence, corruption, electoral malpractice, and dispersed personal and group interests driving politics. It is at this juncture of analytical break-down, however, that Witsoe’s contribution must be located. He poses a simple but crucial question: could there be more to the story of lower-caste mobilization than straightforward political manipulation and inevitable state failure?

The book is structured around the work of parsing this single possibility. What is at stake is nothing more or less than the framework by which we understand the processes of democratic state-formation in India. Witsoe takes the case of Bihar, which most commentators point to as among the most underdeveloped and backward of Indian states, driven by abrasive lower-caste politics, and the site of brazen electoral misconduct, violence, and crippling corruption: a clear example of a failed state. However, such an assessment, Witsoe shows, reflects a normative liberal reading of democracy which abstracts identities, individualizes rights, and relies on regulated, rational procedures—all in a context in which identities cannot be abstracted from local structures of dominance and subordination, entrenched inequalities complicate questions of rights, and rational democratic process appears either embattled or unsuited to coping with electorates less concerned with policy than with seizing power. Therefore, Witsoe suggests, rather than pronouncing the inherently illiberal character of Indian democracy, switch the frame—and the Bihar case starts not only to make better sense, but to teach us invaluable lessons about just how Indian electoral processes constitute distinctive modes of postcolonial democratic governance.

Witsoe’s alternative framework for understanding caste politics in Bihar begins with the notion of “popular sovereignty” (as opposed to individual freedom): in practice, the rule of hitherto unrepresented and disempowered caste groups (or alliances of caste groups), determined by electoral process. Popular sovereignty stems from the experience of local power: everyday inequalities and routine violations structured by interactions with state institutions which, created under colonial auspices and never fundamentally overhauled, ensure that “rights” exist only in theory or well beyond local contexts. The result is a state overwhelmingly controlled by upper castes whose promise of social uplift via development remains undelivered, a rejection of the development paradigm—Witsoe quotes a popular slogan, “we need dignity, not development” (19)—and an interpretation of democracy as the rule of lower-caste majorities, actualized by sheer electoral force. Rights may be external, but the state is not; the everyday practices of state institutions directly structure local relationships of dominance and subordination. Popular sovereignty consists, therefore, of wresting control of the infrastructures of local power; it is necessarily a disruptive form of radical democratic practice that minutely transforms everyday economic, political, and social life and verily characterizes India’s postcolonial democracy.

The seven chapters...