As far as hyperbole goes, Yogendra Yadav’s article ‘Where are our Political Thinkers?’ (IE, August 20) is a zinger. It provokes, overclaims, and then gets it wrong. Hyperbole’s main problem is that it is inattentive to the facts, enamoured as it is with the sound of its own voice. Facts that do not suit the argument are ignored. The facts, fortunately, do not corroborate Yadav’s claim that political thought in India is dead. It is alive in research theses, public commentaries, books and regional seminars. He really must abandon the habit of announcing death too prematurely!
Let us examine Yadav’s claim. There are at least four different issues in his confusing funereal oration. First, he seems to be saying that in the last 50 years in India we have had no political philosophy. In his list of thinkers — Nehru, M N Roy, S A Dange, Lohia and others — there are few political philosophers. Gandhi and Azad perhaps, and possibly Ambedkar. That is it. Political philosophy engages with concepts by unpacking them. It analyses how the elements of a concept are arranged and then either endorses or challenges the arrangement. In India, today, there are a growing number of communities doing political philosophy than 50 years ago. He is dead wrong on political philosophy.
Perhaps he is saying that it is actually “political theory” that is dead. Since political theory is a “framework of explanation”, he may be right to claim that it has a frail existence in India. But this is a condition not, as he suggests, of the last 50 years alone but even longer. In India, we do not build systematic “frameworks of explanation” of power. Not even Gandhi, who had a political theory, did so. His had to be reconstructed by commentators from fragments in his collected works.
The third point: Maybe Yadav means that our political thinking has declined. No leader is debating ideas in politics as Gokhale and Ranade or Tagore and Gandhi did. Fair enough. But many others are doing so in courts, classrooms, and media spaces. Yadav’s “greats”, from his impressive list, had it easy. They could hold forth on politics based on their impressions or prejudices. They had no need to engage with the facts. They knew. Was JP’s idea of “Sampoorna Kranti” based on scientific data? Theoretical framing today, in contrast, has to run the gauntlet of scientific corroboration. The debate between Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, on growth and redistribution, shows this most clearly. Yadav is being too admiring of the “greats” as thinkers. He ignores the context in which they sermonised.
Yadav’s fourth claim, a weaker lament, is that political thinking no longer influences political action. Policies such as the Right to Information, or the abolition of Triple Talaq, or the reversal of the judicial principle of being “innocent until proven guilty” in dowry deaths, or the priority given to “disadvantage” over “discrimination” in the recent 103rd Amendment, show this to be false. Or even, just the right of single persons to adopt children. These draw on a political imagination that is normative and theoretical. They come from ideas of the “good society” that underlies all political thinking. Yadav got carried away when he borrowed a headline from a 1970s debate in the West that “political philosophy is dead”. After Rawls, even the West abandoned this claim.
Yadav’s hyperbole gets further undermined by the new books being published on feminist perspectives of the political, or Dalit epistemic critiques of cultural power, or the growing literature on decolonisation. His argument is enfeebled by the many seminars being held across the country. For example, there is a vibrant discussion on the ideas of Basava or on Sarvarkar’s nationalism. Exegesis is political thought. The field today is more fertile than when the “greats” roamed the land. Would Yadav consider Namdeo Dhasal or Mahasweta Devi as political thinkers?
Yadav’s lament, however, has some merit but not in the way he has presented it. He should have said that since India’s political reality is so complex, it is difficult for anyone to paint a big picture of it — an M F Husain type canvas. Even Husain had to paint four large canvases to depict modern India. This is the challenge of the political imagination. India is too big, too layered, too conflicted, too diverse for political thought to offer a comprehensive account. At best, only partial descriptions are possible. Even the best political thinkers, from anywhere, can only tell a limited story. But such limited stories are being told. At least in PhD research.
From lamenting the inadequacy of conceptual resources in India, where he has a feeble case, to creating new conceptual resources, is a journey Yadav does not make. For example, would he, in a leap of imagination, consider an Indian airport as a site for building a political imagination? Would he accept that citizen India is a wannabe flyer. An Indian airport is, for me, a significant political site that says a great deal about India’s political reality.
Take, for example, three elements of Mumbai’s airport. First, its ownership. It belongs to the Adani group who, prior to their takeover from the previous owners GVK Enterprises, had no experience in running as complex an entity as an international airport. But they hustled successfully. Asset creation in India requires hustling in not just the market but also in politics, the latter enabling the former. Hustling is the dominant driver of Indian political behaviour but would Yadav grant the concept of the “hustler” a status similar to that of “swaraj” or “samata”?
The second aspect of hustling that you see at the Mumbai airport is the blatant consumerism. Citizen India is a voracious consumer of food, fashion, and global brands. Gandhi’s aparigraha has been buried. Seventy-five years of an expanding economy has produced an aspirational middle class that will not be held back by normative guardrails. They have arrived in the public sphere. It is a foolish theorist of Indian democracy who will ignore the power of this hustling class. If consumption goods are what is desired by them then every means will be deployed to procure these goods. Institutions will be under attack. As indeed they are.
Which brings me to the third element of the airport, the overt cultural baggage of the traveller that seeps into their politics. Some days ago, I boarded a flight to Goa and was seated next to a young man wearing chunky gold bracelets and a chain. He had two mobile phones with him. One was the latest folding type which played YouTube videos that he was watching. The music was loud. Disturbing me was not an issue for him. Defeated, I, too, decided to watch his videos. There were many scenes of lovers having a quarrel. And many videos. Multiple versions of Aati kya Khandala. Watching the videos loudly was his announcement of having arrived in the public sphere. Was there a clash of norms here, mine with an emphasis on rights, his with an emphasis on desires? In this clash, of rights versus desires, I saw the universe of Indian democracy. Our political imagination must acknowledge the arrival of the hustler. We are a hustling democracy. Forget the “greats”. They are yesterday’s thinkers.
The writer is an independent scholar
