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Room to Maneuver in the Middle: Local Elites, Political Action, and the State in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Subrata Kumar Mitra
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Abstract

The intuitively plausible relationship between protest behavior and political instability is empirically supported by a large number of studies. Statistical evidence in support of this conjecture is provided by the correlation between indicators of protest behavior such as the presence of extremist parties and groups or the salience of an antisystem dimension and the rapid rise and fall of governments. The theories of writers such as Huntington, Gurr, and Davies suggest that when social and political mobility overtake the rate of economic growth, die result is radical challenge to the system by extremist parties and protest movements, leading to political instability and the loss of legitimacy. The main argument of this article is that the relationship between protest behavior and legitimacy may be more complicated than that, particularly when state responsiveness under the impact of popular protest and redistributive economic policies is seen as an intervening factor. By drawing on a survey of localelites in India, the article shows that certain forms of protest behavior, used in conjunction with conventional forms of participation such as contacting bureaucrats and political leaders at higher levels, might actually contribute to greater legitimacy of the state by providing an alternative channel of participation, extending the political agenda, and contributing to the recruitment of new and previously powerless social forces.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , April 1991 , pp. 390 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1991

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References

1 See Frankel, Francine, India's Political Economy, 1947–1977: The Gradual Revolution (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Frankel, Francine and Rao, M. S. A., Dominance and State Power in India: Decline of a Social Order (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and, for the political implications of poverty and redistribution in India, see Kohli, Ami, The State and Poverty in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

2 For a discussion of the scale and intensity of gherao (literally, to surround a decision maker) and its progeny—rasta rokp (obstructing roads to disrupt traffic), morcha (militant procession), mass casual leave, dhama (refusal to clear an area when ordered to do so), etc.—see Hardgrave, Robert and Kochanek, Stanley, India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 156Google Scholar; Manor, James, “Collective Conflict in India,” Conflict Studies 212 (London: The Centre for Security and Conflict Studies, 1988), 4.Google ScholarMoorhouse's, GeoffreyCalcutta: The City Revealed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 213–14Google Scholar, captures the form and spirit of gherao and its other variations, which are part of a new, authentically Indian genre of collective protest.

3 With reference to secessionist violence in Punjab, three points should be noted. (1) The issue of legitimacy of the state in India continues to divide Sikh opinion; (2) though contested by terrorism, political participation continues to be perceived as the basis of legitimacy; and (3) the state still holds the upper hand in choosing its strategy in transactions with political actors. For the resilience of democracy in India, see Kohli, Atul, ed., India's Democracy: An Analysis of Changing State-Society Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Weiner, Myron, The Indian Paradox: Essays in Indian Politics, ed. Varshney, Ashutosh (Delhi: Sage, 1989)Google Scholar, who singles out the party as the key factor (p. 330).

4 For a discussion of state formation in India, see Subrata Mitra, “Between Transaction and Transcendence: The State and the Institutionalisation of Power in India,” in Mitra, Subrata, ed., The Post-Colonial State in Asia: Dialectics of Politics and Culture (Hemel Hemp-stead: Wheatsheaf, 1990).Google Scholar

5 The findings reported in Barkan, Joel D. and Holmquist, Frank, “Peasant-State Relations and the Social Base of Self-help in Kenya,” World Politics 41 (April 1989), 359–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provide cross-cultural support for this conjecture. They present the “marriage of peasant and state in self-help” as a dynamic factor that has “imbued that system with a measure of legitimacy, and forced the Kenyan state to be minimally accountable to the public …” (pp. 361, 363).

6 In a different context, Sidney Tarrow has drawn our attention to the political and social function of local elites: “Far from behaving like traditional local notables or acting merely as rubber-stamp administrators of programs initiated from above, local elites have become important actors in the political adaptation of their communities to social and economic change.” However, the larger implications of their social and economic roles and the methods they employ to achieve their objectives have not been widely noticed, particularly in the context of developing countries. See Tarrow, , Between Center and Periphery: Grassroots Politicians in Italy and Trance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977).Google Scholar Some studies of panchayatiraj in India have raised this problem at the empirical level. See Narain, Iqbal et al., Panchayati Raj Administration (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1970).Google Scholar

7 This is the argument that runs through Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).Google Scholar It has influenced a number of works on this problem. On antisystem party strength and cabinet instability, see Taylor, Michael and Herman, V. M., “.Party System and Party Government,” American Political Science Review 65 (March 1971), 28–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Communist Party membership and political instability, see Hibbs, Douglas, Mass Political Violence (New York: John Wiley, 1973)Google Scholar; and, on strength of extremist parties and reduced cabinet durability, see Dodd, Lawrence, Coalitions in Parliamentary Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).Google Scholar In his subsequent work Huntington has increasingly tended to see collective protest as a factor that can lead to reform and institutional realignment. See Huntington, Samuel P., American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), esp. 203—10.Google Scholar

8 Hoselitz, Bert F. and Weiner, Myron, “Economic Development and Political Stability in India,” Dissent 8 (Spring 1961), 173.Google Scholar Huntington specified his model in terms of a series of causal statements that link social mobilization, discontent, and political instability; Huntington (fn. 7, 1968), 55.

9 See Gurr, Ted Robert, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)Google Scholar for the empirical specification of this concept.

10 The polarization model is very popular with India's indigenous Left and their Western sympathizers. See Byres, Terry, “The New Technology, Class Formation and Class Action in the Indian Countryside,” Journal of Peasant Studies 8 (July 1981), 405–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12 Barkan and Holmquist (fn. 5), 363. For applications of the same approach, see Bates, Robert, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Popkin, Samuel, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).Google Scholar

13 Powell, G. Bingham, “Extremist Parties and Political Turmoil: Two Puzzles,” American Journal of Political Science 30 (May 1986), 374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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15 See Frankel (fn. 1, 1978).

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17 Ibid., ix.

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23 Powell (fn. 13), 357.

24 The powerful and numerous group of “bullock capitalists”—“small-scale, self-employed farmers who rely more on family labor and their own capital than on wage workers or machines”—is indicative of both the vitality of the process of capital formation and the effectiveness of social limits to the growth of predatory capitalism. For the multiple roles of the state in India, see Rudolph, Lloyd and Rudolph, Susanne, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 400–401.Google Scholar

25 For the application of the reputational technique for elite studies in India, see Singh, Rajendra, Land, Power and People: Rural Elites in Transition, 1808–1970 (Delhi: Sage, 1988).Google Scholar

26 Local protest movements came into prominence in the early 1970s following the dein-stitutionalization of the Congress Party and the decline of intermediate structures. The field-work for this study was conducted after the lifting of the national Emergency (1975–77), which had imposed severe restrictions on the freedom of political activity. The full range of political activities had been restored for about two years when the survey was conducted. The combination of plebiscitary politics at the national level and protest movements at the regional and local level that characterized the spatiotemporal context of the survey have continued to be the dominant themes of Indian politics through the 1980s. (See Rudolph and Rudolph [fn. 24], 127–58, for the rise of plebiscitary politics, and 247–58 on demand groups.) For the results of the survey of the cross-section conducted simultaneously with the elite study, see Chaturvedi, H. R. and Mitra, Subrata, Citizen Participation in Rural Development (Delhi: Oxford and IBH, 1982).Google Scholar A comprehensive report on the elite data, which continue to be interesting because of the enduring importance of local protest movements and the distinctive styles of Gujarat and Orissa politics, will be published in Subrata Mitra, Power, Protest and Participation (London: Unwin, Hyman, forthcoming).

27 See India, Techno-economic Survey of Orissa (New Delhi: National Council of Applied Economic Research, 1962)Google Scholar; and idem, The Techno-Economic Survey of Gujarat (New Delhi: National Council of Applied Economic Research, 1963)Google Scholar, for the socioeconomic background of Orissa and Gujarat.

28 It can, of course, be argued here that the growth of labor markets should offset some of the hardship faced by those without any capital except their labor. However, the migration of poorer people can in effect send both the prevailing wage rate and the annual availability of work downwards. See Breman, Jan, Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Labour Circulation and Capitalist Production in West India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), xx.Google Scholar

29 Supportive evidence of this form of mobility is provided by the literature on electoral mobilization, which informs us of the remarkable progress made in several Indian states by the “backward classes,” which in the politically turbulent sixties, were successful in dislodging the upper-caste leadership from their dominant position. Evidence of electoral mobilization of agrarian interests through “backward caste movements” is provided by Rudolph and Rudolph (fn. 24). Also see the contributions of Wood, John and Church, Rhoderick in Wood, John, ed., State Politics in Contemporary India: Crisis or Continuity? (Boulder, Colo., and London: Westview Press, 1984)Google Scholar, for detailed discussions of the state of mobilization of the “backward classes” in various Indian states.

30 Brittan, Samuel, Participation without Politics: An Analysis of the Nature and Role of Markets (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1975).Google Scholar

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32 Frankel (fn. 1, 1978), 547.

33 On the mobilization of lower castes in Gujarat, see John Wood, “Congress Restored? The ‘KHAM’ Strategy and Congress (I) Recruitment in Gujarat,” in John Wood (fn. 29); and, for upper-caste backlash against the policy of reservation in favor of the former untouchables, tribals, and backward classes, see Mitra, Subrata, “The Perils of Promoting Equality: The Latent Significance of the Anti-Reservation Movement in India,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 25, no. 3 (1987), 292–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 See, for example, Funnell, Victor, “The Philippines: In Search of the Nebulous State,” in Mitra, Subrata Kumar, ed., The Post-Colonial State in Asia: Dialectics of Politics and Culture (Hemel Hempstead: Wheatsheaf, 1990), 131—54.Google Scholar

35 The reference here is to the trade-off between political stability and economic growth that Huntington (fn. 7, 1968) described as options for developing countries. Thus, those developing countries that opt for mass participation and populist economic policies must pay the penalty of high inflation, economic stagnation, and heavy foreign debts.

36 Powell (fn. 13), 374.

37 Sisson, Richard and Wolpert, Stanley, Congress and Indian Nationalism: The Pre-Independence Phase (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).Google Scholar