discussion
Democracy versus Economic
Transformation?
Amita Baviskar, Nandini Sundar
Chatterjee sets up a number
of structural oppositions but a
more insightful and productive
understanding of ongoing change
would not only dissolve some of
these distinctions but also invert
some of the attributes of both
“civil” and “political” society.
Amita Baviskar (amita.baviskar@gmail.com)
is at the Institute of Economic Growth,
New Delhi, and Nandini Sundar
(nandinisundar@yahoo.com) at the
Department of Sociology, Delhi School of
Economics, Delhi University.
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   november 15, 2008
O
n reading Partha Chatterjee’s
marvellously synoptic and yet
equally provocative article on
“Democracy and Economic Transforma-
tion in India”, (19 April 2008) we were
r­eminded of an old joke involving the
arch-villain of Hindi cinema, Ajit, and his
side-kick Robert. Robert, having captured
the hero, asks his boss for instructions.
Ajit gives a diabo­lical laugh and replies,
Robert, tum ise l­iquid oxygen mein daal do.
Liquid ise jeene nahin dega, aur oxygen ise
marne nahin dega (Put him in liquid oxy-
gen. The liquid won’t let him live, and the
oxygen won’t let him die). The same grue-
some fate of being slowly killed while be-
ing kept artificially alive seems to have
befallen India’s peasantry. Substitute cor-
porate capital for Robert, the Indian state
for Ajit, and the Indian (especially rural)
poor for the hero, and we have the gist of
Chatterjee’s article. Even as primitive ac-
cumulation – or the process of dispossess-
ing the peasantry – gathers pace under the
impetus of hegemonic corporate capital,
the legitimacy of the government depends
on the extent to which it can address the
needs of those affected. The consequence
is a set of ameliorative measures negotiat-
ed “politically” (rather than through the
proper rules and procedures characteristic
of civil society) between India’s rulers and
the amorphous masses. Unlike in the clas-
sic model of industrialisation, however,
where the peasantry gives way to an ur-
banised proletariat, Chatterjee forecasts
that the peasantry will remain but “under
completely altered conditions”.
While we agree with many of Chatter-
jee’s observations about contemporary In-
dian political economy, in particular his
recognition of the leading role of Indian
corporate capital as it begins to undertake
g­lobal acquisitions (thus no longer capable
of b­eing simply termed comprador), the
disdain of the middle classes for what they
see as the unruly poor, and the desire of
villagers and the urban poor to engage
with capitalist modernity, we have con-
cerns about his overall analytical frame-
work. Chatterjee sets up a number of
structural oppositions: corporate versus
non-corporate capital; civil society versus
political society; both civil and political
society together versus marginalised
groups (outside any society); government
(as an arena of negotiation) versus capital
and market (impersonal, lacking ideology,
interested only in accumulation); and fi-
nally, dispossession as a characteristic of
the modern economy balanced by welfare
measures. The domains of corporate capi-
tal and non-corporate capital, according
to Chatterjee, map neatly onto civil society
and political society respectively.
A more insightful and productive
u­nderstanding of ongoing social change,
we argue, would not only dissolve some
of the distinctions that Chatterjee sets up,
but also invert some of the attributes of
both civil and political society. We believe
that this moment is particularly exciting
for the future of Indian democracy
p­recisely because it is not only corporate
capital which has a narrative of transition
and a vision of the future (p 61), but be-
cause the battle has been joined by alter-
native narratives put forth by a multipli­
city of groups in society, with often con-
tending visions of democracy (from the
Bajrang Dal to the Naxalites to the peas-
ants of Singur). S­adly, far from benignly
intervening with ameliorative measures,
the Indian state seems to be coming firm-
ly down on one side of the scale, militaris-
ing large swathes of the countryside, in-
cluding Kashmir, the north-east and the
Naxalite belt. Where welfare measures
have been introduced, they have often
been at the insistence of what Chatterjee
would call “political society” or even non-
society/marginal groups. Take the Na-
tional Rural Employment Guarantee A­ct,
the Forest Rights Act, and the Right to In-
formation Act – three pieces of landmark
legislation, which owe as much to the
c­apacity of subaltern groups to wage sus-
tained campaigns that range from rural
India to the footpaths of Jantar Mantar,
as to the prescience of the ruling class.
And even as Indian electoral demo­cracy
is celebrated, deservedly in our opinion,
there is increasingly an attempt to use
p­rocedural democracy and the existence
87
discussion
of   independent statutory institutions to
s­ubvert a more substantive democracy.1
Let us begin with the terminological op-
positions that Chatterjee sets up. While
reco­gnising the need to signal the exist-
ence of an overarching capitalist system
(as against the semi-feudal, semi-capital-
ist system beloved of an earlier generation
of analysts), we fail to understand why he
uses the term corporate and non-corporate
as against simply capital and mercantile
exchange. The classic definition of capital
per se (and not just its corporate variety)
is that it is driven by the logic of accumula-
tion, as against subsistence or exchange.
But more importantly, this distinction fails
to capture the interlinked nature of much
corporate and non-corporate capital in a
world where flexible production connects
multinational firms to domestic produc-
tion, and rural livelihoods are falling apart
under the onslaught of corporate capital,
and where the moneylender also doubles
up as the fertiliser and seed agent. In fact,
a closer look at some of the “welfare pro-
grammes” that Chatterjee describes as
offsetting dispossession, actually serve as
forms of “welfare colonialism” where ac-
cess to micro-credit is premised on buying
diesel pumps, fertiliser, etc, which actually
tie peasants closer into a dependent
m­arket economy.2
Second, the idea that there is something
new about measures like employment
guarantees, subsidised food, and primary
education, in response to a new phase of
primitive accumulation, is debatable – the
poor-house goes back to the days of the in-
dustrial revolution. Even when exercising
eminent domain, the colonial state, at
least in principle, recognised that existing
rights needed to be compensated. The dif-
ference, if any, in people’s ability to de-
mand rehabilitation today comes not from
increased government recognition of the
legitimacy of their demands, but their own
degree of organisation and their increased
ability to speak in terms of the very law
that is used to dispossess them (but more
of that in the next section). Indeed, the
stop-go policy of the government between
the preservation of the peasantry and the
needs of capital that Chatterjee outlines
are familiar from a 1980 article by David
Washbrook, describing the colonial state.
What is new now is that a paternalistic
88
discourse of welfare, whether state-led or
in the form of corporate social responsibil-
ity, has to contend with the counter-claims
of subaltern rights and entitlements. Our
main concern, however, is with Chatter-
jee’s distinction between civil and political
s­ociety and it is to this that we now turn.
Civil Society and the ‘Rule of Law’
Chatterjee’s argument rests crucially on
the distinction between civil and political
society in India. The former coincides
with corporate capital and is governed by
the rule of law. Political society coincides
with non-corporate capital and is marked
by its inability to summon the legitimacy
of law. In Chatterjee’s analysis, the present
moment in Indian political economy is
marked by the “ascendancy in the relative
power of the corporate capitalist class as
compared to the landed elites” (p 56). At
the same time, “the urban middle class,
which once played such a crucial role in
producing and running the autonomous
developmental state…, appears now to
have largely come under the moral-­
political sway of the bourgeoisie” (p 57).
These middle classes make up the domain
of civil society in India; they are treated by
the state as rights-bearing citizens in the
sense imagined by the Constitution. How-
ever, large sections of the rural population
and the urban poor are excluded from
civil society. They inhabit the domain that
Chatterjee terms “political society” and
“make their claims on government, and in
turn are governed, not within the frame-
work of stable constitutionally defined
rights and laws, but rather through tem-
porary, contextual and unstable arrange-
ments arrived at through direct political
negotiations...” (ibid). The claims of politi-
cal society for governmental benefits al-
ways remain illegitimate: “these cannot
often be met by the standard application
of rules and frequently require the decla-
ration of an exception” (p 61). Members of
civil society resent the “unruliness and cor-
ruption of systems of popular political
repre­sentation” (p 62). The task of manag-
ing these tensions between civil and politi-
cal society is the “difficult and innovative
process of politics” (ibid) in India today.
However, when we examine the work-
ings of corporate capital and the urban
middle classes in India, what is striking is
november 15, 2008  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly
their manifest disdain for the Constitution
and for the legal process. Marx did not de-
scribe primitive accumulation as an order-
ly, lawful process but noted that: “In actu-
al history, it is a notorious fact that con-
quest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in
short, force, play the greatest part” (Marx
1990: 874). The description holds for In-
dia today: the violent crushing of peasant
opposition to land acquisition shows the
collusion between corporate capital and
the state, a compact that cannot be de-
scribed as “civil” by any stretch of the im-
agination.3 Equally notable are the ex-
traordinary concessions granted to corpo-
rate firms in the form of land for mining,
ports, special economic zones, which set
aside labour, environmental and proce-
dural rules. Even the judiciary have been
complicit in allowing “exceptions” when
the defendants have been powerful
enough. For instance, the Supreme Court
condoned the well-connected Swami-
narayan sect’s construction of the Ak-
shardham religious theme park in Delhi
on the Yamuna floodplain, encroaching on
an area designated in the city master plan
as an ecological zone. On the other hand,
the eviction of poor squatters as well as
l­egal farmers living in the vicinity was
e­ndorsed by the court on the grounds
that the law must be upheld. More
recently, the Supreme Court glossed over
the illegalities of the Vedanta Group by
the simple expedient of giving its flagship
com­pany Sterlite a bauxite mining lease in
Niyamgiri in Orissa, over­riding strong ob-
jections by the resident population.
Reversing the Facts
Chatterjee inverts what is actually the
case: generally, it is members of the so-
called civil society who break laws with
impunity and who demand that the rules
be waived for them, whereas members of
political society strive to become legal, to
gain recognition and entitlements from
the state. The state’s differential treat-
ment of these two classes is exemplified in
the case of encroachments and irregular
land use in Delhi. While the law was
e­nforced to demolish the settlements of
working class squatters, penalising people
who were victims of the state’s failure to
build low-cost housing, it was amended to
“regularise” the illegal construction and

violation of zoning codes by well-to-do
traders and homeowners. It was the poor
‘jhuggi’-dwellers who desperately dis-
played their documented claims to citi-
zenship – voter IDs, ration cards and
t­okens issued by the slum department.
The rich encroachers simply demanded
that their illegality be condoned and they
succeeded in getting their way.
Civil society is thus not a domain of he-
gemony as Chatterjee describes, but of
domination. Its attempts to make eco-
nomic liberalisation the common sense of
our times are accompanied by brutal state
repression and the anomalous exercise of
law. At the same time, the category of po-
litical society is inadequate for describing
the variety of social formations that stand
ranged against or in collusion with the
corporate and urban middle classes. For
example, the silence or tacit support given
to Bajrang Dal activists to burn Christian
homes in Orissa and Karnataka, or to self-
styled custodians of culture to attack exhi-
bitions, burn books, etc, suggests a grow-
ing intolerance precisely in that sphere of
civil society which Chatterjee claims lives
by the rules, as well as a growing state un-
willingness to curb this.
If one perceives peasants as political be-
ings, and the state is perforce bound to do
Classes, Capital and
Indian Democracy
Partha Chatterjee
Partha Chatterjee responds to the
three comments by Shah, John
and Deshpande, and Baviskar and
Sundar, on his essay “Democracy
and Economic Transformation
in India”.
Partha Chatterjee (partha@cssscal.org) is
with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences
C­alcutta and also with the Columbia
University, New York
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   november 15, 2008
so, a functionalist formula of preserva-
tion-dissolution falls apart. Instead, at-
tention must be focused on how the “great
transformation” of our times (Polanyi
1944) – the attempt by the economy to
dominate society – summons forth power-
ful counter-movements that resist the
commodification of land and labour, as
well as groups that are set up precisely to
divide society. The career of corporate
capital in rural India is more complicated
than Chatterjee allows; besides primitive
accumulation it includes forays into the
formal subsumption of labour to capital
(e  g, contract farming) as well as the real
subsumption of labour to capital (e  g, di-
rect takeover of land for agroforestry).
Most recently corporate capital has not
been content with ruling behind the
scenes, but its members have actually en-
tered Parliament or state legislatures
themselves. The counter-movements that
resist corporate moves are also diverse
and deploy a range of political resources
that far exceed Chatterjee’s description.
Categories such as civil society and politi-
cal society fail to capture the character of
domination in India today, thereby miss-
ing the brutality and desperation and, de-
spite these, the inherent dynamism and
hope that still persists.
I
t is immensely gratifying to be com-
mented upon and even criticised by
younger scholars whose work one has
greatly admired and whose views are a
pointer to the direction that Indian social
science will take in the years to come. I am
thankful to Mary John and Satish Desh-
pande, Mihir Shah, and Amita Baviskar
and Nandini Sundar for the care and
seriousness with which they have read
my article “Democracy and Economic
Transformation in India” (19 April 2008,
hereafter DET). My response below is in
the spirit of continuing the discussion.
discussion
Notes
1 For example, the Bharatiya Janata Party used
Modi’s electoral victory in 2002 to justify the
genocide in Gujarat; the existence of institutions
like the National Human Rights Commission
is used to deflect attention from India’s human
rights record; and even as the cash for votes deals
in the 2008 trust vote became an “open secret”,
they were subsumed within a framework of par-
liamentary procedure.
2 This is brought out clearly in ongoing research
by   Malwa Muniswamy, a PhD student at the
Jawaharlal Nehru University, on the Velugu
programme, a World Bank funded microcredit
scheme in Andhra Pradesh.
3 See for instance, police firings at Maikanch village
in Rayagada district, Orissa, in which three people
were killed protesting against land acquisition for
bauxite mining in 2001; at Tapkara in Ranchi dis-
trict, Jharkhand in which nine were killed protest-
ing against the Koel Karo dam in 2001; at the Khu-
ga dam site in Churachandpur district, Manipur
in which three were killed in 2005; at Kalingana-
gar in Orissa, in which 12 were killed protesting
against a Tata steel plant in 2006; at Nandigram
in West Bengal where some 15 were killed in 2007
protesting against land acquisition for a special
economic zone. This is by no means an exhaus-
tive list of recent police violence related to land
acquisition. Increasingly too, as in the Posco steel
project in eastern Orissa, the Alcan bauxite project
in Kashipur and the SEZ in Nandigram, armed
gangs supported by the company and assisted by
the local administration and police have been used
to coerce villagers into parting with their land.
References
Marx, Karl (1990) (1867): Capital, Vol 1 (London:
P­enguin Classics).
Polanyi, Karl (1944): The Great Transformation:
The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(B­oston: Beacon Press).
Washbrook, David (1981): “Law, State and Agrarian Soci-
ety in Colonial India”, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (3).
John and Deshpande are right in
s­uggesting that in DET, I have tried to in-
quire whether the apparently hegemonic
position recently acquired by corporate
capital in urban society in India also e­xtends
to the countryside. I have also tried to flesh
out the dynamics of what I call “political
s­ociety”, earlier worked out for urban popu­
lations, in the contemporary rural context.
The route I have chosen in DET is to connect
with an older Marxist discussion of transi-
tion to capitalism, passive revolution of
capital and the politics of the subaltern
classes, and to ask if an adequate under-
standing of our contemporary situation
r­equires a reconceptualisation of those old-
er categories. This, of course, is only one
possible trajectory to an under­standing of
the present and, needless to say, other ave-
nues could be profitably explored.
Hence, if Mihir Shah is convinced that
class analysis of the Marxist variety is
89