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Understanding India's new politicaleconomy: a great transformation?Mitu Senguptaa

a Ryerson University, CanadaPublished online: 13 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Mitu Sengupta (2014) Understanding India's new political economy: a greattransformation?, Contemporary South Asia, 22:1, 108-109, DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2014.880238

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2014.880238

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humanitarian crisis and to evolve an understanding leading to a solution which can save adi-vasis from further attack by the state and theMaoists. The author intends in the book to adopta rational approach which looks at logical explanations for the actions of Maoists and thestate, all the while keeping in focus the adivasis who are caught in the cross fire betweenthe two. The book is not based on fieldwork but instead on reviews of a wide spectrum ofdocumentary sources available in the public domain. These are mostly secondary sourceswith the exception of the primary source material in documents outlining theoretical ideas.

Mukherji first presents a brief account of the Maoist Movement in India from the 1967Naxalbari uprising to the emergence of the current Communist Party of India (Maoist) andexamines its claim of a connectionwith the originalmovement. This is useful as a backgroundfor the book. The second chapter points outs both the shortcomings and strengths of Indiandemocracy, and puts up the thesis of its necessity even from radical perspective as even thosecritical ‘require the state with all its glaring limitations so that people can access it’ (33).Mukherji argues that theMaoist phenomenon has to be understood as emerging from a demo-cratic deficit. The third chapter analyzes many narratives and accounts of theMaoist phenom-ena to separate propaganda and pro-Maoist narratives from truth. Mukherji employs veryclose readings of some of these ideological works and is able to bring out the contradictionswhich help in comprehending the real picture. The fourth chapter, ‘Arms over people’, pre-sents how the adivasi youth are at the frontline of the Maoist guerrilla army although the lea-dership is essentially non-adivasi. The claim of the Maoist leadership that the welfare of theadivasis is their primary goal is put to test by Mukherji. He does this by analysing two booksdetailing travels in Maoist areas and three detailed interviews with the topMaoist leadership.Even if one were to grant everything said in these documents as correct, it becomes clear withthis analysis that the lives of adivasis have become more deprived. The Maoists have notallowedwelfare schemes of the state; their interest is notwelfare but establishment of guerrillazones and bases fromwhere an attack on the state can be launched. Caught in this situation arethe adivasi children, who suffer not because of any ideology, but primarily because of theirneglect and exploitation by the state. The tragedy is that government military actionagainst Maoist insurgency will first kill these neglected citizens of the country. Mukherjiargues that the state must create conditions for the surrender of the adivasis by having apolicy of universal amnesty and then go after the essentially non-adivasi Maoist leadershipwith a targeted and precise military response.

The book adheres to its objectives, focusing on the adivasis and the humanitarian crisiswhich looms over their life-worlds. With his sharp analysis and very close readings,Mukherji is able to critique the Maoist insurgency seriously and to offer a way forward.

Sujit R. ChandakM.D. Shah Mahila College, India

sujitchandak@gmail.com© 2014, Sujit R. Chandak

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2014.880237

Understanding India’s new political economy: a great transformation?, edited bySanjay Ruparelia, Sanjay Reddy, John Harriss and Stuart Corbridge, Abingdon, Routledge,2011, 269 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-59810-1

This timely book has an ambitious goal. The ‘Introduction’ promises the reader a ‘coordi-nated intellectual conversation’ explaining the ‘causal relationships’ between three ‘most

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important’ transformations in India’s political economy since the 1980s – ‘the influence ofliberal economic reforms, the ascendance of Hindu cultural nationalism, and the empower-ment of historically subordinate classes through popular democratic mobilization’ (1).

What follows is not quite this. In the absence of a concluding chapter, the task of arriv-ing at a coordinated intellectual conversation is left to the reader, who is equipped with littlemore than the Polanyian framework pitched in the book’s first 20 pages. But while this isnot an introductory text, the challenge of creating a symphony out of the separate notes isultimately a rewarding exercise. One might begin with any one of the book’s 14 chapters, allwritten by high-calibre authors who have already made their mark in the field.

John Harriss’s chapter, ‘How far have India’s economic reforms been “guided by com-passion and justice”? ...’, is as good a starting point as any. Harriss finds that while thepursuit of neoliberal policies cannot be blamed for the continuing prevalence of ‘ill-being’ in India, ‘it is also clear that recent very high rates of growth have not been translatedinto comparably high rates of growth of productive employment, or of improvements inwell-being’ (131). This trend is unlikely to abate, he argues, given that India’s politicallypowerful middle classes have shown little interest in universal provision of social security.Nandini Gooptu’s chapter, ‘Economic liberalization, urban politics and the poor’, shedssome light on why. As urban middle classes have retreated into securitized residentialenclaves – where most services are provided privately – they have become disconnectedfrom the country’s public education and health-care systems.

As Rob Jenkins suggests in ‘The politics of India’s special economic zones’, further-more, India’s cities are not the only casualties of a brutal form of spatial reorganizationthat has cut citizen off from citizen. Jenkins documents the proliferation of SpecialEconomic Zones, which he sees as representing ‘a desire by both political elites andthose who aspire to middle-class status to… secede from the rest of India… to escapethe consequences of [the political empowerment of historically subordinate classes]’(49). As the book unfolds, one grasps the significance of a key point articulated in itsintroduction: ‘We are witnessing the consolidation of “hunger amidst plenty”, in savagemimicry of broader social and spatial trends in India’s political economy’ (9).

Yet this volume’s strength lies not only in its trenchant critique of neoliberalism andelite revanchism, but also in its focus on counter-hegemony and resistance. It is perhapsPatrick Heller’s chapter, ‘Making citizens from below and above ... ’, that provides the shar-pest view of the proverbial ray of light. ‘There are clear signs of a Great Transformation’,Heller says, and he adds ‘what has undeniably changed ... [is] the slow but increasingcapacity of subordinate groups to voice their grievances… to redeem the unredeemed citi-zenship claims of a democratic society’ (170). Among other things, the ascent of histori-cally marginalized groups has altered the political horizons and behaviour of stateofficials. The few who are genuinely ‘guided by compassion and justice’ – to use languagefrom the title of Harriss’ chapter – are now better able to tackle the stranglehold of elitepower brokers at multiple levels of society and government. Whether this and the prolifer-ation of rights-based movements across the past decade amount to a countermovement, inthe Polanyian sense of the term, is one of the many interesting questions that this importantbook leaves us to ponder.

Mitu SenguptaRyerson University, Canada

msengupta@politics.ryerson.ca© 2014, Mitu Sengupta

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2014.880238

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