TheDaak review

The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World by Partha Chatterjee, March 2004, 200 pages, ISBN: 9780231130622, ₹495

By Pallavi Raj

The book is a collection of essays, built from the lectures Chatterjee delivered at Columbia University. The collection will be of specific interest to scholars and readers of democratic politics and the role of institutions like state, civil society and leaders in the political arena. In The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Partha Chatterjee by viewing India as  representative of most of the regions across the globe moves away from the prevalent understanding of many discourses like modernity, citizenship, nation-state and democracy. The book conceptualizes not only the idea of political society, but argues that it is where political modernity is being forged in contemporary time. The book puts forth the debates related to nationalism, America’s hegemonic role post and pre-9/11 attack and population citizen debate.

The book begins by posing a conflict that lies at the heart of politics across the world, i.e., opposition between civic nationalism and particular demands of cultural identity. This opposition, Chatterjee argues, characterizes the transition that took  place from the conception of democratic politics grounded in popular sovereignty to the democratic politics being shaped by governmentality. In this context he refutes Anderson’s classification of nations being in the “homogenous empty time”(p. 6). This is the time not affected by any particular event and is also empty as a number of events can fit into it and it is due to this time that people who have not met each other and who are living distant from each other are able to relate to each other and are able to identify themselves as a part of single nation. This time is also the time of the capital or modernity. And any resistance to it leads to an assumption that it is either coming from humanity’s past, something pre-modern, something that belongs to pre-modern, thus, classifying capital and modernity as ultimate triumphs. However, Chatterjee, through several examples of the postcolonial world, depicts otherwise. For instance, how an industrialist can delay the closing of a business deal on account of pending confirmation from their astrologers or voters who had set fire to themselves to mourn defeat of their beloved political leaders, or leaders who openly make claims of providing jobs to only their own clan keeping the others out. Chatterjee calls this as the presence of ‘dense and heterogeneous time’ thus, refuting from classifying these phenomena as modern or pre-modern, or even the co-presence of several times because this would again lead us falling into the trap of utopianism of Western modernity. And these times are not just products of the pre-modern past but new products of the encounter with modernity. That is the reason Chatterjee argues for calling it the heterogeneous time of modernity (p. 7). 

Further he also discusses the shortcomings of modern political theory whether liberal, communitarian, Marxist or republican and their failure of taking governmentality in their consideration. The understanding of community in all these theories are those which are regulated by legal order of private property, i.e, the community of property owners who are able to govern themselves. Consequently, it is those who are not able to govern themselves are those to be governed forming the political society. Chatterjee has retained the old idea of civil society as bourgeois society as used by Hegel and Marx and brought it to the Indian context where civil society in India, as he argues represents the high ground of modernity, a group of “culturally equipped citizens” (p. 34). In a formal structure of state with a constitution, law, everyone constitutes a part of civil society, since everyone is a citizen who has rights which are equal to any other fellow citizen of that state. However, as Chatterjee argues, in reality, things are not the same. Most of the citizens in India are only  contextually or ambiguously part of the civil society and that too not as an active member. They are not regarded as  proper members of the civil society and are also not regarded as such by the institutions of the state (Chatterjee, 2004). However, the story does not end here. It also does not mean that they are excluded from the domain of politics or are out of reach of the state. Since they reside within the territorial domain of the state, they have to be looked after and hence, controlled by the governmental agencies. And the processes that involve their interaction with these agencies do materialize in the form of political relationship with the state. And it is here precisely where the ‘politics of governed’, as the title suggests, takes place. To political society, he gives a space that lies between state and civil society, a space of various activities and institutions with several mediations taking place mostly with frequent violations of law so as to receive welfare and goods. It becomes imperative here to bring the distinction cited by the author between population and citizen that came up with the emergence of mass democracies in the advanced industrial countries of the West in the twentieth century. Citizens inhabit the domain of theory, they carry the ethical connotation of participation in the sovereignty of the state. On the other hand,  population constitutes  the domain of policy, population is descriptive and empirical without any normative burden. They can be classified, identified and are amenable to statistical techniques like census and surveys. It is this population which becomes the target of  any economic policy or might as well cause political mobilisation. 

The book mentions the members of the  People’s Welfare Association (squatter residents of Rail colony Gate number one) in this context and how they have to use the terms like refugees, landless people, day laborers, homestead, below the poverty line, all categories of governmentality in a petition in order to protect their homes from getting destroyed and uprooted. This is argued to be a testament to the fact that members of the political society cannot escape themselves from what Rolando Vasquez refers to as ‘parameters of legibility’(Vasquez, 2011).  In order to claim even livelihood and basic living conditions, one has to fit in such categories, since the epistemic territorial practices are of a nature that anything that lies outside its domain is automatically made invisible, is excluded from the real and is even unnamed. To make it more clear, there might be people near the railway colony who might be landless but not below poverty line and there might be some who may be all landless, below poverty line and refugee at the same time. Where do we place them then? These are some of the questions put forward when we read this text deeply.

In talking about the global dimensions of the politics of the governed in the second half of the book, Chatterjee brings up the larger debate of the political aspect of globalisation, i.e., What happens to the state? With global dispersal of various activities like manufacturing and production, there is also centralisation of control and administration. The larger task of the national state controlling the economy is put into question. The author also embraces the views of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri about a new kind of stateless empire with United States forces at the top. The book states a very important contradiction  in the existence of the empire itself. Although the empire does not go to war or conquer territory and its main objective being maintaining peace and democracy, it does not lay out any guideline or toolkit for it. Moreover, world over,  there is a resistance towards it. To support his argument, he cites cases of Europe and North America where any kind of assembly meeting of the leaders of MNCs or international financial institutions is disrupted by demonstrators without any central organisation. Chatterjee also questions the leadership and  the response towards acts of terror, specifically 9/11 when the President of the United States immediately announced that the country was at war and the attack being analogous to the Pearl Harbor attack. Instead of pacifying the situation, they chose to speak for ending states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,  Libya and Islamic militants in Lebanon and Palestine. The author argues that in the absence of any clear enemy or targets, the whole onus falls on unconcealed religious, cultural and ethnic hatred. 

In the second last chapter, Chatterjee touches upon the contradictions of the politics of secularism in India. First, the incapacity of Indian political leaders to separate the domain of politics and religion. Second, an absence of procedure to determine who was to represent minority communities in their deals and negotiations with the state. He uses a controversy in West Bengal related to growth of religious schools, i.e., madrasas and the urgency for their modernisation to explain the problem of political representation of minorities in a secular democratic state. Although the Left Front in West Bengal played a crucial role in providing that political representation which allowed for modernizing the curriculum of funded madrasas, yet, recently the growth of private madrasas and rise of imams as trusted leaders in politics for the rural poor has brought up several questions of representation. He highlights that such situations can increase the possibilities of communal violence along with posing a challenge for opening up of democratic politics of secularism so that the question of political representation for religious minorities could be negotiated.

Chapter seven examines the impact of the ‘global city’ on political society and urban politics in Calcutta with the rise of a new middle class, composed of a managerial and technocratic elite, in the 1990s. The state is sponsoring this process through the eviction of squatters and clearing of slums to make space for business districts, shopping malls, office buildings, and segregated residential clusters for the affluent. In the last chapter of “Are Indian Cities becoming bourgeois at last?”, he analyzes the growing impact of global cities on political society, more specifically on urban poor and politics in Calcutta. One factor related to it was the change in nature of the socio-political dominance of the wealthy and the cultural leadership of the middle class that existed till two decades of independence. However, caste-like associations sustained by patron-client relationships still did not end, proving an incompatible position in the definition of bourgeois public life of a modern city. He explains the role of urban poor as a population group in the functioning of political society. With the twin effects of the rise in democracy  and development in the 1970s and 1980s, the nature of political society consisted of an overlapping demand for electoral mobilization and welfare administration. The primary reason for urban poor to be taken care by the government is based on twin foundations that completely made them devoid of any citizenship per se. First, they provide easy labor and services which are essential to maintain cities. Second, if they are not cared for, then they can endanger the safety and well-being of the citizens. So even if they are looked after, the primary rationale is that of benefit in terms of social, economic and political outcomes. For example, if slums are provided with sanitation facilities, it is expected of them to not dirty the streets or parks.Thus, huge sections of urban poor cannot be treated as citizens in the substantive sense because their habitation and livelihood are most often premised in the violation of law. The main theoretical argument he puts forward is that the conception of citizenship and its emphasis on relentless homogeneity stands in sharp contrast to the governmental administration of development and administration that produces heterogeneous society, with multiple populations groups targeted through multiple policies at multiple points of time. The author also suggests that it should be the task of political associations to mold the empirical discreteness of the population into a moral community.

Chatterjee also brings in an interesting paradox in the last chapter about the modern Indian imagination of cities. The paradox lies here: the place where colonial modernity was conceived in India along with the production of India’s nationalist elite are the Indian cities, but generations of scholars, thinkers , novelists and artists in the age of nationalism invested most of their time and energy in producing an idea of a rural India that would fit the modern age and not of an Indian city. Chatterjee talks about the post-industrial society where there is a decline of traditional manufacturing along with growth of service sector, there is new segregated and exclusive space for people in service sectors usually called technocratic or managerial elite, and these new high-technology industries are located in the newest and environmentally most attractive spaces of the metropolis. He states that even though the new metropolis is globally connected, it is disconnected from large sections of population who are considered as politically disruptive or dangerous.

Chatterjee uses important concepts like modernity, empire, population and citizenship for understanding the larger context of development, democratic politics and even neoliberalism to a huge extent. With the rise of majoritarianism, damage due to development in terms of environment, livelihood, poverty, destitution, displacement, growth of urban poor and refugee crisis is explicitly visible. The book emphatically argues that it is important  for every government across the world to descend from the high echelons of civil society to political society.  It is evident that today drastic changes for transforming any realm of society could not be taken without the consideration of people of any democracy. Farmers’ protest recently was an evident example in this context. Social movements have changed over the years, so has the way to govern and forms of governmentality. There is a growing crisis of legitimacy across the globe. For example, the massive economic crisis in Sri Lanka recently. Thus, there is growing urgency to ponder upon the functions of state, its role for welfare, its extent, its sovereignty and moreover its larger effects on both population and citizen in the modern world. In a context where questions of national security are raised every now and then for electoral mobilization, Chatterjee has put light on the lives of those who live on the margins, in the illegal spaces, in slums, near railways, under the bridges, on footpaths, fearing each day about their home and one time meal. This also strikes us with the paradox that modernity brings with itself. And that is precisely the reason why the book stands so relevant and urgent today. However, while reflecting on the conceptual categories of political and civil society through examples of rural Calcutta in India, he tries to explain the popular politics in most of the world which can be insufficient for explaining ‘politics in most of the world’, as the title suggests. However, the Indian case does help in highlighting various critical issues relevant for various countries today in the world.

References

Chatterjee, P. (2004, March 10). The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. https://doi.org/10.1604/9780231130622

VÁZQUEZ, R. (2011, March). Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence. Journal of Historical Sociology, 24(1), 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.2011.01387.x