The Indian Civil Sphere E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 569

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Indian democracy is in trouble. A still widely popular, democratically elected leader stands athwart it, dangerously authoritarian and disrespectful of civil liberties, the independence of the courts and the press, and disputatious vis-à-vis organized counter-powers. Leading intellectuals, Indian and Western, write about the death of Indian democracy and the passage to despotism. Despite these clear and present dangers, this volume suggests that the death of Indian democracy has been greatly exaggerated. To understand why, we must move beyond democracy narrowly understood as a governmental form to a broader theory of the cultural, associational, and institutional life necessary to sustain it.

Building on the insights of civil sphere theory, this volume presents a complex understanding of the progress, reaction, and upheaval that has buffeted independent India. The vitality of India’s civil sphere nourished vast waves of anti-caste movements that energized Indian politics, creating civil repairs that brought it closer to its founding promise to become a less hierarchical society. Yet, the very success of these progressive movements triggered tsunamis of backlash reaction – Hindu revivalism, Muslim exclusion, horrific outbreaks of communal violence.  Narendra Modi and the BJP rode these reactionary waves to power, but, as the 2024 election demonstrated, it is a power still hedged in by the continued vitality of India’s civil sphere. Despite pressures from big business and big government, print and digital media continue to broadcast powerful critical interpretations, speaking truth to power at critical junctures. The Indian legal order, despite enormous problems, continues to protect speech, association, the right to vote and the right to have those votes counted accurately.

A powerful demonstration of both the richness of civil sphere theory and the vitality of Indian democracy, The Indian Civil Sphere will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics and Asian studies and to anyone interested in the politics of the world’s largest democracy.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Notes on the Contributors

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Indian Civil Sphere between Vitality and Suppression

Model of the Civil Sphere

Civil Sphere in Independent India

Contradictions: Independent India’s “Actually Existing” Civil Sphere

Anti-Caste Movements and Civil Repair

Frontlash/Backlash

Layered Backlash in India

Cultural Backlash and Political (de)Formation

Between Vitality and Suppression

Notes

Civil Repair and Anti-Caste Movements

1. Caste, Incivility, and the Prospects of Civil Repair

Introduction: Caste, Covid-19, and Incivility

Melavalavu Massacre: Caste Morality and Movements for Change

Votes and Violence: Caste and Chidambaram Constituency

“Honor Killings”: Policing Caste Boundaries

Scripting Change?

Conclusion: Dalit Struggles and the Possibilities for Social Repair

Acknowledgments

Notes

2. The Indian Civil Sphere and the Question of Caste: The Case of the Hathras Movement

Introduction

Dalits, India’s Civil Sphere, and Anti-Caste Movements

Rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party

Emergence of the Hathras Movement

The Backlash

Conclusion

Notes

3. Can the Brahmin be Civil? The Ambiguous Repair of Caste Privilege

Introduction

The (Categorical) Problem of the Brahmin

The Brahmin Subject amidst the Demands of Solidarity

Incompatible Demands, Irredeemable Vacillation

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

4. Civil Sphere versus Civil Religion: Hindutva and its Multiple Opponents in Karnataka

Civil Religion and Civil Sphere

Caste and Hindu Habits of Heart

Hindutva – Hinduism as a Civil Religion

Hindutva and Sublated Hinduism in Karnataka

Civil Sphere versus Civil Religion

Concluding Remarks

Notes

5. The Authoritarian Civil Sphere, Populism, and Secular Sectarianism

Populism and Civil Solidarity

Dualism against Duality

Secular Sectarianism and “Civil Repair”

Notes

The Macro Framework

6. Building Solidarity, Attempting Civil Repair: Pious Altruism and Muslim Politics in Post-Babri Mumbai

Muslims and the Civil Sphere in India

Pious Altruism as Social Solidarity

Universalizing the Language of Civil Justice?

Conclusions

Notes

7. Financial Inclusion: Private Interventions in the Civil Sphere

Background – Exotic Finance for Exotic Locales

The Universalizing Discourse of Market Salvation

Boundary Lines and Constructing the Poor

Microfinance

Constructing the Poor, Redux – Office Cubicle, Village, Slum

The State: Regulator, Participant, Actor

Discourses, Meanings (and their Absence)

Considerations through the Lens of CST

Notes

8. The British Raj and its Legacy for Democracy and Civil Society in India

British Rule and the Transformation of Indian Society

The British Raj: The Making of Modern India

The Tharoor Indictment

Assessing the British Legacy

Notes

Commentary: India and the Civil Horizons of Political Community

India’s Constitutional Horizons – Beyond Authenticity

Tolerance for Diversity, Sphere Differentiation, and Civility at a Distance

Hindutva: Reimagining Political Community and its Civil Horizons

Responding to Hindutva: Restore Civil Society or Seek New Civil Horizons?

Notes

Commentary: Leveraging the Heuristic Potential of the Indian Civil Sphere

Conclusion: Two Antagonistic Visions of India’s National Identity

The Civil Code and Democratic Constitutions

The Uncivil Code of Hindu Nationalism

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Future of Democracy

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Notes on the Contributors

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Indian Civil Sphere between Vitality and Suppression

Begin Reading

Conclusion: Two Antagonistic Visions of India’s National Identity

References

Index

End User License Agreement

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The Indian Civil Sphere

Edited by

Jeffrey C. Alexander and Suryakant Waghmore

polity

Copyright © Polity Press 2025

First published in 2025 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6383-8

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Notes on the Contributors

Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University, Director Emeritus of Yale’s Center for Cultural Sociology, and Co-Editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Among his recent publications are What Makes a Social Crisis: The Societalization of Social Problems (2019), Civil Repair (2024), and Frontlash/Backlash (2025).

Ramesh Bairy T. S. teaches sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology. He is the author of Being Brahmin, Being Modern: Exploring the Lives of Caste Today (2010).

Raju Chalwadi recently submitted his PhD in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. For the academic year 2022–23, he was a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow affiliated with the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research has previously been published in South Asia Research and EPW, including the chapter “(Re)Constructing Spatial and Social Relations: Valmikis of Mumbai and Their Everyday Challenge to Caste,” in Caste in Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan 2023).

Qudsiya Contractor is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Education, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Her work focuses on the changing salience of religious identity in urban India. Among her recent writings is “Religious Imagination in the Making of Public Muslims in a Mumbai Slum,” published in Culture and Religion (2022).

Karthikeyan Damodaran is an Assistant Professor, Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Marginalized Communities at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a senior journalist with The Hindu newspaper for seven years before completing his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. He worked as a Research Fellow in the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, and as Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies, School of Creative Liberal Education, JAIN (Deemed-to-be University), before joining NLSIU. His research focuses on caste processions and commemorations in Tamil Nadu and performances of traditional masculinity in contemporary times. He is the author of numerous sole- and joint-authored articles on Dalits, Dalit politics, Dravidian politics, and Tamil cinema.

Hugo Gorringe is a Professor of Sociology and former Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His research in India focuses on the sociopolitical mobilization of Dalits and their struggle to achieve equality and deepen Indian democracy. He is an editorial board member of Contemporary Voice of Dalit (Sage). He is the sole author of Panthers in Parliament: Dalits, Caste and Political Power in South India (Oxford University Press 2017) and Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratization in Tamil Nadu (Sage 2005), and he is co-editor of several books, including Caste in Everyday Life: Experience and Affect in India (Palgrave 2023, with D. Bhoi) and Civility in Crisis, Democracy, Equality, and the Majoritarian Challenge in India (Routledge 2021, with S. Waghmore). He has also published numerous articles and chapters on identity, violence, space, caste, and politics.

Ajay Gudavarthy is currently Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is currently Associate Member, Institute for Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Canada. He was earlier Visiting Professor, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Gottingen University, Germany (2014); Visiting Fellow, Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law, University of Aberdeen (2012); Visiting Faculty, Goldsmith College, UCL, London (2010); and Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow, SOAS, London (2008). His published work includes Politics of Post-Civil Society (Sage 2013), Maoism, Democracy and Globalization (Sage 2014), India after Modi: Populism and the Right (Bloomsbury 2018), and Politics, Ethics and Emotions in “New India” (Routledge 2023); and edited books include Re-Framing Democracy and Agency (Anthem, London 2012), Revolutionary Violence versus Democracy (Sage 2017), and Secular Sectarianism: Limits of Subaltern Politics (Sage 2019).

Peter Kivisto is the Richard A. Swanson Professor of Social Thought Emeritus at Augustana College. Recent books include The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory (Cambridge University Press 2021), Populism in the Civil Sphere (Polity Press 2020, with Jeffrey C. Alexander and Giuseppe Sciortino), and The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016 (Emerald 2017).

Krishan Kumar is University Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, USA. He was previously Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Bergen, Bristol, Bocconi, the Central European University, and Hong Kong. Among his publications are Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987), 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (2001), The Making of English National Identity (2003), Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (2017), and Empires: A Historical and Political Sociology (2021). He is currently writing a book about the Chinese Empire.

Kartikeya Saboo teaches social anthropology at Wichita State University in Kansas, where he is doing research on political persuasion, sexuality, and culture. He runs a field school of ethnography and applied anthropology in a semi-rural community. He has previously studied racial capitalism and criminal labor in the Northeastern United States.

Giuseppe Sciortino teaches sociology at the Università di Trento, Italy. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the Civil Sphere Theory Network, and the editor, with Martina Cvajner and Peter Kivisto, of the Research Handbook in the Sociology of Migration (Edward Elgar 2024).

Trevor Stack is Professor in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He holds a BA in History and a Masters in Social Anthropology from Oxford University, a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. Stack founded and directs the interdisciplinary Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL), which focuses on the study of political concepts in the world. He has been doing research mainly in Mexico since 1992, primarily on aspects of citizenship and civil society. Stack has published Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (University of New Mexico Press 2012) and edited the volumes Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (Brill 2015), Breaching the Civil Order:Radicalism and the Civil Sphere (Cambridge University Press 2020), Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community (Rowman & Littlefield International 2021), and Citizens Against Crime and Violence: Societal Responses in Mexico (Rutgers University Press 2022).

Carlo Tognato is currently Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. He has been for two years Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota and before that Senior Policy Fellow for another two years at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Before moving back to the United States at the end of 2019, he was, for over a decade, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology of the National University of Colombia, Bogotá, as well as, for four years, Director at the Center for Social Studies at the same university. Since 2014, his research has focused almost exclusively on civil reconstruction and civil degradation.

Suryakant Waghmore is Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is author of Civility against Caste (Sage 2013).

Preface and Acknowledgments

This volume has a long backstory.

As a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh in 2008, Waghmore won Best Paper Prize at the university’s annual New Directions in Sociological Research conference. He was urged by an anonymous reviewer of the paper to make use of Alexander’s The Civil Sphere (2006) to further develop his thoughts about caste, civility, and civil society.

Five years later, Waghmore wrote to Alexander about the publication of his own book, Civility against Caste. Alexander replied, “I’m asking the Yale Library to order your book so I can read it!” And, after doing so, wrote back enthusiastically.

In 2017, Waghmore invited Alexander to come to IITB in Mumbai to participate in a conference on caste, religion, and civility. Unable to attend, Alexander suggested to Waghmore that they plan a conference on the civil sphere in India.

At the beginning of 2018, Alexander came to Mumbai for a week’s lectures on cultural sociology and to plan such a conference with Waghmore. On January 3, 2018, in Jalvihar Seminar Hall, Waghmore chaired Alexander’s lecture, “The Civil Sphere.” On the IITB website, the topic of that lecture was described thus:

The Civil Sphere is a new general macro-sociological theory of contemporary democratic societies. It combines cultural and institutional levels. Comparison with the instrumentalization of political science and political sociology, on the one hand, and the idealism of Habermas on the other. The role of “the binary discourse of civil society.” The centrality of solidarity, but one that is exclusive as well as inclusive. Regulatory and Communicative institutions. The contradictions and dynamics of real existing civil spheres.

The conference was to take place in 2020 but the pandemic caused it to be postponed. It took place in New Haven in spring 2022.

We thank Shivani Choudhary for her assistance throughout the days of the conference as well as for the suggestions she made for the Introduction to this volume. Nadine Amalfi, the Administrator for Yale’s Center for Culture Sociology, organized the entirety of the conference with her usual blend of efficiency and good cheer. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Templeton Foundation and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund established by Yale University’s Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies. Dr. Patti Phillips provided excellent copy-editing before the manuscript went into press with Polity, where John Thompson had already made its publication possible.

We thank the contributors to this volume for their patience, their dedicated attention, and, above all, for their insight.

Jeffrey C. Alexander and Suryakant Waghmore

When a people has lived for centuries under a system of castes and classes, it can only reach a democratic state of society through a long series of more or less painful transformations.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

IntroductionThe Indian Civil Sphere between Vitality and Suppression

Jeffrey C. Alexander

Indian democracy is in trouble. A highly popular, democratically elected leader stands athwart it, dangerously authoritarian and disrespectful of civil liberties, the independence of the courts and the press, and disputatious vis-à-vis organized counter-powers. Leading intellectuals, Indian and Western, are writing books about the death of Indian democracy and the passage to despotism (e.g., Chowdhury and Keane 2021). These dangers are very real, but I will suggest in this introductory chapter that the death of Indian democracy is greatly exaggerated. To understand why, we must move beyond democracy narrowly understood as a governmental form to a broader theory of the cultural, associational, and institutional life necessary to sustain it. In the seventy-five years since India’s independence, there has been an extraordinary development of its civil sphere. As my co-editor Suryakant Waghmore has written, in India, even today, “one easily gets a feel of the vibrancy of democracy and the politicization of public spaces” (Waghmore 2013: xxix).

Model of the Civil Sphere

An independent civil sphere is essential to sustaining democracy as a way of life, a structure of discourse, a mode of experience, and a feeling for others that sustain a wide range of civilly oriented, non-governmental institutions (Alexander 2006). The civil sphere can be conceived as a differentiated social arena with relative autonomy vis-à-vis other, “non-civil” realms, such as economy, religion, family, and state. Defined by feelings of solidarity rather than monetary profit, salvation, loyalty, or power, civil ties transcend narrower, more primordial commitments to kinship, race, religion, ideology, and region. The utopian ideals of the civil sphere intertwine respect for individual autonomy with collective obligations toward people whom we will never actually meet in person but whom we symbolize via discourses that endow them with such sacred democratic qualities as cooperativeness, altruism, independence, rationality, and honesty. Yet, even as we bind ourselves to such brothers and sisters, we inversely symbolize those who are outside the civil sphere – as being so aggressive and selfish, dependent, irrational, and deceitful that to include them in our collectivity would be to undermine our capacity for self-government.

This binary discourse of sacred–civil and profane–anti-civil is a language spoken without thinking, not only by those inside civil spheres but those outside wanting in – by those on the left, right, and center; by rich and poor; religious and secular; male and female; dark skinned and light. Not whether one speaks this language but how and to whom its potent binaries are applied is what decides inclusion and exclusion and triumph and defeat; which social movement is legitimated and which repressed; which social policy applauded and effected and which booed and rejected; which political party lionized and reelected, which humiliated and sent down to defeat.

It is the institutions of the civil sphere that specify this generalized civil discourse, connecting it to policies, parties, movements, and people. Communicative institutions – factual and fictional media, associations, public opinion and polling – create moment-to-moment interpretations of ongoing events in real time, sacralizing them as civil or polluting them as dangerously not. Regulative institutions – law, office, elections, and parties – also create purifying and polluting interpretations, but via judgments that are longer in the making and can be enforced through the coercive arm of the state.

Civil Sphere in Independent India

The cultural and institutional ingredients for creating a civil sphere in India were well in place by the time of its independence from the British empire in the mid-twentieth century. In some part, they were the residue of the more public-facing, “beneficent” face of British colonialism that emerged after, and in opposition to, the grossly abusive domination of the East India Company (Wilson 2023); in another and more substantial part, they were the product of a strenuous struggle, within this newly emerging institutional and discursive framework, of the elite that led the “National” movement and played such an outsized role, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, in bringing a civilizationally relevant version of “modernity” to India. Regulatory institutions were created that could sustain independent India’s democracy. In 1885, this emerging Indian elite, forging ties with British reformers, created the Indian National Congress (INC), and in the early decades of the twentieth century this political party, now called simply Congress, contested and triumphed in British-sponsored elections at local and national levels (Brown 2003: 43), which had increasingly expansive franchises (Jaffrelot 2003a: 11, 47–77). Along with the regulatory institutions of elections and parties, a powerful framework of independent Indian legal adjudication had also formed within the colonial state. “By the 1940’s,” writes Rohit De in A People’s Constitution, “India’s legal profession constituted a fairly well-defined professional public with common journals, association meetings, and lobbying groups” (De 2018: 27; cf. Austin 1999a [1966]: 206). At the time of independence, India had 72,425 licensed legal practitioners, the second highest in the world outside the United States (De 2018: 27).

The background for these democratically oriented regulative institutions was the energetic effort of the modernizing elite to develop a broadened, national solidarity. Communicative institutions played the central role. By the mid-nineteenth century, there emerged a plethora of voluntary organizations dedicated to “public service,” whether motivated by the reformed Hindu notion of seva (Gorringe 2005: 91; Watt 2005), Christian charity, or Fabian socialism. “Social service, charitable and philanthropic initiatives,” writes Watt in Serving the Nation, “were animated by notions of active citizenship and mediated by a growing network of associations [that] aimed at improving and strengthening the ‘community’, ‘race’ and ‘country’” (Watt 2005: 1, 3).

Service and self-help groups … encouraged the efficient use of dana or “charity” for the public good; they promoted the cooperative credit movement and the principles of mutual aid; and they were involved in a wide variety of more mundane activities such as distributing water to third-class rail passengers [and] helping the elderly. [T]here was particular concern about the “uplift” of the lower castes, classes and untouchables. [Such] citizen activism and the culture of association contributed to the shaping of India’s sociological landscape, namely its “public sphere” and “civil society.” (Watt 2005: 3, 5)

As the sense of a national “public opinion” began to crystallize, so did uncounted numbers of magazines and newspapers, regionally and nationally (Barns 1940; Natarajan 2021 [1955]). Their “news” avidly communicated interpretations of social and political life in colonial India, applying the binaries of civil discourse to the independence movements and their enemies (Sen and Roy 2014; Sen 2017).

Journalism travelled from England to various colonies [and was] constructively adapted by the local elites. [It] prepared the groundwork for the use of the press as a powerful weapon during India’s freedom struggle … as a site where the first impulses of Indian nationalism were being expressed. Journalism also became an effective tool for social and religious reform. (Sonwalker 2019: 36)

Four decades after independence, there were already 32,000 newspapers in India; two decades later, 94,000 (Rodrigues and Ranganathan 2015: 10); and five years after, with the advent of cable, 825 television channels and 300 24/7 news channels broadcasting in sixteen languages (Rao 2019: 1). Critical investigative journalism flourished, creating explosive revelations that often “shook the nation” (Rodrigues and Ranganathan 2015: 68). In 1987, after The Hindu documented kickbacks that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s government had received from a Swedish armaments company in exchange for government contracts (Rodrigues and Ranganathan 2015: 70), the Congress party was defeated in the 1989 national election. In 2011, in the midst of “stories about corruption and a lack of transparency and accountability among politicians and bureaucrats,” journalists sympathetically interpreted the anti-corruption sit-ins and hunger strikes of the septuagenarian Anna Hazare, who declared that “a second freedom struggle” had begun (Rodrigues and Ranganathan 2015: 164, 154). “The mainstream media, particularly the 24-hour news channels, could not find a better story – full of drama, conflict, visuals, and popular support,” write Rodrigues and Ranganathan (2015: 155). This “media event” (Dayan and Katz 1992) rekindled idealism about office inside the Indian civil sphere, in the face of “forgotten ideas and lexicon [about] ‘corruption’, ‘conflict of interest’, ‘misuse of office’, ‘the political-corporate nexus’, ‘cross-party collusion’” (Rodrigues and Ranganathan 2015: 169). While the liminal drama fizzled out in 2012, due to the fading health of its protagonist and media allegations of financial abuse by some members of Team Anna and Anna himself, the opposition BJP party and its leader Narendra Modi swept to power in 2014, promising “Good Days Are Coming” and launching the “Clean India Campaign” after his victory (Jaffrelot 2014).

If it was the later stages of coloniality that, counterintuitively, had “opened up public spaces” and “spheres of freedom for competitive political mobilization” (Waghmore 2013: xx), it was the Constitution of newly independent India – ratified in 1950 after three years of extraordinary conversation, consultation, compromise, and innovation – that crystallized the legal foundations for the new nation’s impressively developed communicative and regulative institutions (Austin 1999a [1966], 1999b). The Constitution laid out a detailed series of negative liberties (Berlin 2002) guaranteeing individuals and groups freedom from constraint – rights to free speech, religion, association, and free press. Yet, equally importantly, the Constitution also inscribed a novel set of positive liberties, promising Indian citizens freedom for developing their economic, biological, and cognitive well-being, from women’s rights to universal public schooling, to abolishing untouchability and “scheduling” lower castes for affirmative access to wide-ranging opportunities. In the words of the legendary chronicler of the constitutional assembly, Granville Austin, the founders had created not only the lineaments of a political democracy, but the framework for a social revolution (Austin 1999a [1966]). In one fell swoop, the Constitution guaranteed the full panoply of legal, political, and social rights that, according to the influential theorizing of T. H. Marshall, had taken three centuries to evolve in Britain (Marshall 1965).

India’s founding fathers and mothers established in the Constitution both the nation’s ideals and the institutions and processes for them. [A] democratic and equitable society … was to be achieved through a social-economic revolution pursued with a democratic spirit using constitutional, democratic institutions…. Representative government with adult suffrage, a bill of rights providing equality under the law and personal liberty, and an independent judiciary were to become the spiritual and institutional bases for a new society – one replacing the traditional hierarchy and its repressions. Other constitutional provisions were designed to spread democracy by protecting and increasing the rights of minorities, by assisting under-privileged groups in society to better their condition, and ending the blatant oppression of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes…. The Constitution, by its very existence, was a social revolutionary statement. (Austin 1999a [1966]: xi–xiii)

Contradictions: Independent India’s “Actually Existing” Civil Sphere

These foundational articulations of the Indian civil sphere were manifestly utopian, and they exerted extraordinary cultural-cum-institutional power.1 In “actually existing” civil spheres, however, there is a clash between the real and ideal, which creates the contradictions that dynamize social change. Such contradictions create wrenching strains that motivate efforts at civil repair, as well as the backlash that ineluctably reacts against them. The Constitution laid out ideals for practicing democracy and expanding solidarity, and the secular, mostly British-educated leaders of the successful national movement dedicated themselves to carrying these ideals out. But India’s social resources were hardly a match for these high political aspirations.2 For one thing, rather than a bourgeois “middle class” that could define its ideal and material interest in democratic terms, most regions of independent India were controlled by landed property owners with an interest in maintaining caste-cum-class; they had no objective interest, in other words, in generating the kind of generalized, free-floating resources that the Indian masses would require if their newly promised liberties were to be substantiated (Corbridge and Harriss 2000: 31–9; cf. Moore 1966). The Constitution did gesture toward the public ownership of national wealth, but its insistence on submitting property seizure to legal adjudication effectively blocked the distribution of land in more egalitarian ways.

Resistance to expanding material solidarity was complemented, indeed motivated, by powerful cultural and affective commitments to caste hierarchy. There was a reason that Western social theorists had so often defined their own liberal ambitions by contrasting them with Hindu India’s Homo hierarchicus (Dumont 1970). Among the great Axial religions (Bellah 2011) that laid the basis for multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 1982; Alexander 2020), Hinduism was least able to generate the distance from primordial attachment that is required to nurture critical universalism and, eventually, equality (Bellah 2011).3 With its four varnas and the thousands of infinitely differentiated jatis, or subcastes, spreading out amongst them, Indian Hinduism sacralized powerfully primordial over civil attachments – commitments to family, place, occupation, and gods (Alexander 2024). Rather than imagining salvation as equality and liberation, caste imbedded individuals in their local community and demanded loyalty to authority, requiring deference to those above and legitimating domination over subordinates below. What underlays a civil solidarity is the sense of the fundamental sameness of every human being; in caste society, by contrast, “difference is absolute” (Hall 1998 in Waghmore 2013: xxi). B. R. Ambedkar was the only Indian founding father from the avarna – one “without varna,” the residual outcaste category so polluted that they could be identified only as untouchables, in Hindi Dalits. In his impassioned Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar memorably argued that the caste system was actually not “a division of labour,” but rather “a division of labourers” (Ambedkar 2016 [1936]: 223). Ambedkar polemized that caste was inimical to democracy: “The effect of caste on the ethics of the Hindus is simply deplorable. Caste has killed public spirit. Caste has destroyed the sense of public charity. Caste has made public opinion impossible. A Hindu’s public is his caste. His responsibility is only to this caste” (Ambedkar 2016 [1936]: 259).

Anti-Caste Movements and Civil Repair

It is remarkable that, despite these powerful ideal and material contradictions, for many decades after independence the Indian civil sphere allowed, indeed encouraged, less privileged Indians to make good on the promises of their Constitution and the utopian promises of their civil sphere. In region after region, the lower castes created powerful social movements that leveraged the civil sphere’s communicative and regulative institutions to effect (Alexander 2024) that, materially and symbolically, significantly extended national solidarity.

“The constitution has undermined the legitimacy of caste,” Hugo Gorringe argues in Untouchable Citizens, his ethnography of Dalit movements and democracy in the southern region of Tamil Nadu, demonstrating in copious detail how India’s civil sphere “provided the oppressed with the institutional means to challenge their subordinate status” (Gorringe 2005: 21). As a newly “horizontal mobilization” (ibid.) emerged among the once highly fragmented untouchables, they engaged in protest petitions, mass rallies, marches, and organized public disruptions, appealing across caste boundaries to the civil obligations that putatively bound the privileged social groups above them. In the 1970s, the Dalit Panthers exploded onto the social scene, the product of a younger generation who expressed a “fanatical passion for equality” (Gough 1960: 44 in Gorringe 2005: 117). “Time and time again,” Gorringe writes, young Dalits “assert[ed] their common humanity: ‘If we are cut do we not bleed? Is our blood not as red as yours?’” (Gorringe 2005: 119). In the midst of a steeply hierarchical society, this “rejection of dharma and assertion of equality” certainly “constituted a cultural revolution” (Gorringe 2005: 348, italics added). Yet, the Panther leader Thol. Thirumavalavan insisted that, when his people leveraged the broader solidarity that underlaid the promises of a civil sphere, this movement of “the people at the bottom rung of society” aimed not at political revolution but incorporation: “The organization of the Liberation Panthers,” he remonstrated, “is a movement aimed at the well-being of the general population”; as a democratic movement, “it seeks to promote better understanding between castes. It is a democratic movement” (Gorringe 2005: 53, italics added). “If we do not exercise our right to vote in the state or general elections,” a Dalit activist explained, “our immediate enemies are the ones to gain” (Gorringe 2005: 286). Gorringe observes that “the subaltern seem to think democracy is working for them” (Gorringe 2005: 291), that, despite their exploitation, “the majority of Dalits still place their faith in the democratic process,” insisting that what they “wish to see [is] their leaders in power [in order to] render political institutions accountable” (Gorringe 2005: 343).4 Because their movements were effective, Dalits were “entering the mainstream” (Gorringe 2005: 324; cf. Gorringe et al. 2016).

In his more macrosociological study of northern India, the French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot traces an equally powerful incorporative process generated by lower-caste social movements, concluding that “North India is going the way South India [has] already gone” (Jaffrelot 2003a: v). He traces the same process of subcaste fusion among Dalit jatis – Dalit caste fragments – into extended groupings reflecting more “horizontal solidarity” (Jaffrelot 2003a: 147, 150). Describing this wider grouping as an “alternative social imaginaire,” Jaffrelot observes a new “collective identity” that is now much more “conducive to the emancipation of the lower castes” (Jaffrelot 2003a: 151) because its ties more closely align with those that define India’s relatively independent civil sphere.

Another new development among the civil sphere’s communicative institutions was the emergence of civil associations like BAMCEF, a coalition among the so-called “Backward Classes” dedicated to solidarity and uplift, whose 200,000 members eventually formed a successful political party (Jaffrelot 2003a: 39).5 And peasant leaders like Charan Singh – the “champion of farmers” who eventually became India’s fifth prime minister – organized broad movements of lower castes into powerful political organizations that could successfully compete in state and eventually national elections.

The aim of these social movements was not only to gain subjective recognition, via communicative institutions, but to force regulative institutions to make good on, and deepen, long-promised quotas guaranteeing lower-caste groups entry into education and employment in government. By 1977, the proportion of upper-class MPs in the national parliament had already fallen below 50 percent; ten years later, it was below 40 percent. Singh declared, “a silent transfer of power is taking place in social terms” (Jaffrelot 2003a: 350). By the early 1990s, “scheduled” quotas for Dalits and OBCs (“Other Backward Classes”) were expanded to ensure them fully one-half of all new positions in government and higher education. James Manor was certainly right to conclude, in a recent overview, that “the strong influence which higher castes once exercised over local affairs has been substantially eroded over time” (Manor 2021: 134). There has been “a marked increase in inter-caste accommodation which pre-empts violence,” Manor insists, and which has “foster[ed] the growth of a certain minimal civility towards Dalits” (Manor 2021: 129). The Indian civil sphere had been wedged open (Stack 2019) by powerful lower-caste movements for social change.6

Frontlash/Backlash

As the first two chapters in this volume make vividly clear, the struggle for the civil repair of caste hierarchy was anything but a smooth unfolding process, the kind of “adaptive upgrading and value generalization,” for example, that Talcott Parsons theorized in his teleological approach to social evolution (Alexander 2005). Just as the African-American freedom struggle faced fierce resistance, so has the Indian anti-caste movement – not least bigoted judges and police, terrifying violence and brutality. Waghmore points to the “anxieties of the privileged and dominant castes over their eroding control of ex-untouchables” (Waghmore 2013: 161). Manor warns that anti-caste “struggles for inclusion and decency … only partly succeed,” and that even “when they make some headway,” their success “often lead[s] to … fresh dilemmas and disappointments” (Manor 2016: xiv). Even as the relative autonomy of a democratic civil sphere allows “groups [to] coalesce, assert themselves and … acquire some influence,” he explains, the “reactions of adversaries – and even some of their own successes – create new impediments and sometimes trigger disintegration and disempowerment” (Manor 2016: xiii). Mendelsohn and Vicziany (1998: 53 in Gorringe 2005: 133) analyze the many “incidences of high caste retaliation,” the “extravagant revenge” triggered by Dalits’ “resistance to subordination and claims to social respect.” Gorringe recounts “the ‘story’ of Melavalavu,” “known to all Tamil Dalit activists” (Gorringe 2005: 135), that recounts the “premeditated massacre of [Dalit] panchayat president Murugesan, and five of his followers” (ibid.).

When Murugesan contested and won the seat reserved for SC’s [Scheduled Castes] in the Melavalavu panchayat (local elections) in 1977 [he] had to stand against the … threats of the locally-dominant Thevar caste. [But] the legal recognition accorded to the post of panchayat president was insufficient to protect Murugesan and his followers from being massacred in broad daylight by those who could not countenance the elevation of an Untouchable to a position of responsibility. (Gorringe 2005: 21)

At best, it was two steps forward, one step back; at worst, one step forward, two steps back. Like the Black freedom struggles in America, Dalit and OBC movements to “annihilate caste” (Ambedkar 2016 [1936]) in India triggered right-wing reactions, which not only blocked further advances of civil rights, but sometimes overturned what had already been achieved. To the degree they are successful, movements for empowerment undermine extant ideal and material interests, interests deeply entrenched inside the compromised civil order, not only among elites but among privileged fragments of the masses as well. Civil repair brings greater freedom and equality for the many, but it reduces freedom of action for previously hegemonic others. For Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, victory over Apartheid felt like “the long walk to freedom” (Mandela 1995), but for those who profited from Apartheid, ideally and materially, the ANC’s victory felt more like a car crash. What they experienced was whiplash, an injury that festers unless therapeutic interventions are made. Civil repair is a frontlash movement whose victories create aggrieved parties, with backlash movements the likely result (Alexander 2019b).

Frontlash/backlash polarizes civil spheres. This dynamic can have the effect of pushing left-wing movements to the far left and right-wing movements to the far right, animating hostile, even paranoid antagonisms that can undermine the solidarity whose civil character provides the very underpinning of democracy. The dynamics of polarization are inherent to an open society, a normal feature of democratic social change. In relatively “healthy” civil spheres, there is a pendulum movement, frontlash pushing society to the left, backlash pushing it to the right. The danger is that the pendulum will get stuck on either side, that extreme right or left populism, after legitimately winning state power, will wish to keep it to themselves. If they can suppress the autonomy of the civil sphere, they will be able to prevent the social pendulum from swinging back to the other side. Martin Luther King famously declared, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice” (King 2022 [1963]). But his was a normative profession of faith, not a clear-eyed statement about the dark possibilities of empirical social life. Just as backlash movements have allowed anti-democratic leaders to gain power in the Americas and Europe, so have far right populists in India, like current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ridden waves of backlash sentiment to gain state power. Skillfully marshalling the binary discourse of India’s civil sphere, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have gained state power, and they have begun to throttle the nation’s independent communicative and regulative institutions.

Layered Backlash in India

There are distinctive dimensions, or layers, that have created the backlash against civil repair in India and the discourse and institutions of the civil sphere that have facilitated it. They reach back centuries into colonial prehistory, yet they are as recent as the nationwide election that played out as this book was going to press. Each dimension is powerful, but none on its own is dispositive. They are layers of the same cake, whose combinatorial power creates the capacity to block the pendulum of Indian political life from swinging back from the right side to the center and left. Whether such a fateful freezing happens cannot yet be determined. The Indian civil sphere will have its say.

In the space of this introduction, there is not the opportunity to fully explore the many layers of India’s democratic achievement and the backlash against it. I am laying out a blueprint, not the building that might be made from it. In what remains of this chapter, I employ civil sphere theory to suggest a new approach to the challenges facing Indian democracy.

Hindutva

The discourse of civil society that so powerfully shaped, and still shapes, the contours of democratic India is a metalanguage. A syncretic structure in Saussurean terms, civil discourse can also be understood in an historical, or diachronic sense, as a developing cultural tradition that amalgamated binaries from classical republicanism, Christianity, and modern liberalism. Emerging from the political discourse of ancient Greece, in the shadow of the declining Roman empire, republicanism became intertwined with Christianity, the three distinct elements creating an ideological compound that informed the democratic breakthrough of the early Renaissance city states, like Florence and Venice (Skinner 1978a). In a more radicalized form, this potent brew later fueled the Protestant Reformation (Skinner 1978b), which in turn triggered the first modern democratic revolution in seventeenth-century Britain – an upheaval that Michael Walzer once described as “the revolution of the saints” (Walzer 1965). One century later, this radical democratic ideology, which Robert Bellah called the American “civil religion” (Bellah 1970), marked the language of the American Revolution (Bailyn 1967; Hatch 1977; Bloch 1985).

Why bother with this strand of Western cultural history in an essay introducing the civil sphere in India? Because it provides the basis for a critical comparison. In the West, democracy emerged from within the religious tradition.7 While the discourse of civil society is not in itself religious, it had metaphysical anchoring.8 Whereas in the democratic formation of Britain and America, there was hardly any air between civic radicalism and religious salvation, in India exactly the opposite was the case.9 The discourse of the Indian civil sphere was rooted in an imported, religious-cum-secular ideology of the colonizer. It should not be surprising that so many Indians, not only religious elites but religious masses, experienced civil discourse and institutions as threatening, not only to their religion but to their traditional way of life.

“Hindutva” is the ground base for India’s backlash against democracy (Nussbaum 2007: 152–85). A Hindi term roughly translated as “Hinduness,” Hindutva is more, and less, than the Hindu religion. It is a manifestly nationalistic and backward-looking variation – one that, in the words of Jyotirmaya Sharma, one of its most astute scholarly contemporary critics, constitutes an “emotive call to ‘culture’ and ‘traditional values,’” a cultural movement that aims at eviscerating “India’s democratic, republican, rational and secular foundations” and resurrecting, in their place, an “imagined glorious past” in which the metaphysics and social structure of Hinduism reign supreme (Sharma 2015: 4). In its most recent incarnation, Hindutva is the ideology of the BJP, the massively popular political party that recently triumphed in its third successive national election. It is hardly an accident that the BJP was born, three-and-a-half decades ago, as a protest against “Mandalization,” the last, and deepest, expansion of the quotas for lower-caste Indians put into place by socialist Prime Minister V. P. Singh in 1990 (Jaffrelot 2003a: 320–49).

Yet Hindutva as cultural movement goes back much further, to the mid-nineteenth century. When Christian missionaries condemned Hinduism for its idolatry and superstition (Jaffrelot 1996 [1993]: 14), Hindutva’s foundational thinkers responded by polluting European civilization as materialist, sacralizing Hinduism’s putatively higher spirituality. In a work that was foundational to the Hindu revival, Satyartha Prakash, the Light of Truth, Swami Dayananda Saraswati declared that the authors of the Western Bible were savages and the Christian God nothing more than a “flesh-eating trickster” (Saraswati 1972 [1875]: 612 in Sharma 2015: 47; cf. Jaffrelot 1996 [1993]: 16–17). India’s humiliating subjection at the hands of the British, however, was deemed less the result of colonial power than the degeneration of Hinduism itself. It was “indolence, negligence, and mutual discord” that had allowed India to be “crushed under the heel of the foreigner” and its people “to bear untold misery and suffering” (Saraswati 2002 [1875]: 267 in Sharma 2015: 34). To purify Hinduism, there would have to be a return to the religion’s most ancient texts, the Vedas, for “it behooves all good people to hold in due respect the teachings of … ancient history” (ibid.). Composed millennia earlier, the Vedas were written in Sanskrit, which the Hindu revivalists claimed as the mother of all languages, and they were composed by Aryans, an early Indian civilization whom Saraswati exalted as having been “sovereign rulers of the whole earth” (Saraswati 1972 [1875]: 266 in Sharma 2015: 32). While revivalists rued later Hinduism’s diffusion of the caste system into fragmented jatis, they adamantly insisted that caste hierarchy had been essential to the Vedic Golden Age and would be foundational to the Hindu revival. The Brahmins occupied the first varna, Saraswati suggests, because, quite simply, they deserved to, for it was they who best understood and taught Vedic wisdom. As for the Shudras, the fourth and lowest varna, they had been relegated to that position because of their dismerit, for they were simply unable to learn.

Wherever it is declared that the Shudras are debarred from the study of the Veda, the prohibition simply amounts to this: that, he that does not learn anything even after a good deal of teaching, being ignorant and destitute of understanding, is called a Shudra. (Saraswati 1972 [1875]: 79 in Sharma 2015: 52)

Alongside the loss of spiritual wisdom and the threat to vertical caste organization, an animating concern of the Hindutva revival was what they viewed as a concomitant withering away of masculinity. In post-Vedic times, they claimed, Hinduism had allowed itself to become dangerously effeminate, which had rendered it vulnerable to outside subjugation. For this reason, Hindu revival would have to depend, not only on Brahminic wisdom, but also on the dharma of the militant Kshatriya varna, a caste category just one rank below it. Sri Aurobindo, another highly influential Hindu revivalist, declared, “the first virtue of the Kshatriya is not to bow his neck to an unjust yoke but to protect his weak and suffering countrymen against the oppressor and welcome death in a just and righteous battle” (Aurobindo 1998 [1906–8] in Sharma 2015: 60–1). Just as Arjuna, the hero of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata and the “very symbol of Kshatriya” (Sharma 2015: 61), had chosen to fight to save ancient India rather than surrender to oppressive tyranny, so would today’s “weak and unmanly Indians” (Sharma 2015: 65) have to transform themselves in order to shake off their contemporary oppressors. Moral uplift must be accompanied by he-man physical rehabilitation, famously alliterated by another major Hindutva thinker, Swami Vivekananda, as “beef, biceps, and the Bhagavadgita” (Sharma 2015: 56). With rhetorical flourish, the Swami even suggested that young Indians might actually be “nearer to Heaven through football than through the study of the Gita” (Vivekananda 1999 [1951], vol. III: 242 in Sharma 2015: 117).

You will understand Gita better with your biceps, your muscles, a little stronger. You will understand the mighty genius and the mighty strength of Krishna better with a little strong Blood in you. You will understand the Upanishads better and the glory of the Atman, when your body stands firm upon your feet, and you feel yourself as men. (ibid.)

A less concrete and more generalized effect of these foundational Hindutva ideas was to undermine the origin myth of Indian democracy. Their revised Hinduism displaced India’s democratic founding fathers, like Gandhi and Nehru, who had led the fight for national independence, along with the other civilly minded founding fathers who had created the new nation’s constitution and whose Congress party ruled India in its early formative decades. The real origins of “Mother India,” Hindutva claims, were millennia earlier, in Vedic times, when mythically religious Aryans had created a Golden Age. The national narrative of democratic India was progressive and hopeful: since the nation’s founding in 1947, the story went, there had been massive civil repair that worked to resolve contradictions in the Indian civil sphere. Hindutva, by contrast, sketched a backward-looking narrative; according to this story, it had all been downhill since the Vedic Golden Age, a decline that had actually been exacerbated by the birth of democratic India at midnight on August 15, 1947, when India had become putatively, but only superficially, free.10

It was the thinking of a fourth foundational Hindutva thinker, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, that transformed this theological renewal of ancient wisdom and manly militancy into organizational forms that could “consolidate and strengthen Hindu nationality” (Savarkar 1969 [1923]: 140 in Jaffrelot 1996 [1993]: 25) and unleash the final struggle for the “Hindu Rashtra [nation].” In the 1870s, Dayananda Saraswati had created the proselytizing Arya Samaj, or Noble Society (Jaffrelot 1996 [1993]: 13–20; Sharma 2015: 54–5); three decades later, in order to “Hinduize all politics and militarize all Hindudom,” Savarkar created the revolutionary and violence-prone secret organization Abhinav Bharat Mandir, the Young India Society (Savarkar 1967 [1942]: 2). In 1925, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a Hindutva militant deeply influenced by Savarkar (Sharma 2019: xxvii–xxix), founded the infamous Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS (Association of National Volunteers). His disciple, M. S. Golwalkar, succeeded him as RSS leader and transformed its ascetic, militant, and largely Brahmin cadre into the most effective extremist organization in Indian history (Jaffrelot 1996 [1993]: 33–79) – “a rigid, codified, monochromatic and aggressively masculine entity” (Sharma 2019: xix; cf. Nussbaum 2007). In every locally organized RSS group, or shakha, the morning would begin with strenuous calisthenics, which were followed by intensive ideological-cum-religious training highlighting extraordinary deeds recorded in the Vedas, along with discussion of equally heroic deeds to come. By the end of the Second World War, 600,000 RSS shakhas had spread across India, and they now included lower-caste members who were willing to undergo renunciation for the Hindutva cause. In January 1948, Nathuram Godse, a militant Hindutva ideologue, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. Nehru’s newly formed government temporarily outlawed RSS and arrested 20,000 of its activists; Godse walked to the gallows singing the RSS hymn “I bow to you always, O loving motherland” (Sharma 2019: xxxiv).

Islam

Rather than hating Gandhi for being secular, an obvious impossibility, Godse believed the Mahatma’s original sin to be his lifelong protest against Hindutva-inspired struggles to cleanse India of its Muslim minority. Indeed, while Hindutva stridently resented the British Raj for its Christian and democratic discourse, its efforts at religious reconstruction were also powerfully, if less conspicuously, motivated by antagonism to the six-century long Muslim colonialization of India. Not just the Raj, but this immensely powerful non-Western occupier had also made Hindus weak. “Wave after wave of barbarian conquest has rolled over this devoted land of ours,” Vivekananda decried: “‘Allah Ho Akbar!’ has rent the skies for hundreds of years, and no Hindu knew what moment would be his last” (Vivekananda 1999 [1951], vol. III: 269–70 in Sharma 2015: 99). During Mughal rule, Golwalkar declared, “there was no one to protect the Hindus,” yet, “despite force and inducements,” there remained people “who kept the commitment to Hindu culture intact by singing songs in praise of Lord Ramachandra and Lord Krishan [and] kept faith, tradition and piety alive” (Sharma 2019: 12). The RSS aimed to continue this heroic, Hindutva-inspired resistance in the present day.

Despite the massive intrusion of the East Indian Company, Mughals had managed to sustain their rule over India until the Government of India Act established the Raj in 1858. The British allowed Muslims to maintain their distinct, mosque-centered religious practices. Vis-à-vis the Hindu majority, the Raj treated the minority Muslim population virtually as a “separate but equal” collectivity entitled to incipient social and political rights, including the possibility of voting for their own religiously affiliated representatives in local and national bodies (Brown 2003: 129; cf. Bhagat 2001). Even as Muslim elites actively participated in the independence movement, they developed their own national aspirations and organizations, fearful of becoming a despised minority in a Hindu-dominated post-independence India. This developing Islamic nationalism was fiercely countered by secular and religious leaders of the Indian National Movement, most spectacularly by Gandhi’s furious declamations, backed up by dramatic fasts and yatras (marches/ pilgrimages) that remonstrated for a more religiously inclusive, all-India form of civil-religious solidarity. These efforts could do little, however, to stem the tide. By the early twentieth century, an Indian-Muslim elite was demanding independence, not only from the Raj, but from “Hindu India.” A Muslim League formed, led by the fiery nationalist M. A. Jinnah (Brown 2003: 131ff), and began pushing for the creation of a physically separated Pakistani state.

Anti-Muslim resentment among the Hindu masses intensified accordingly, and horrific episodes of what came to be termed “communal” violence marked the early and middle years of the twentieth century (Guha 2007: 624–50; Jaffrelot 2011: 343–408; Cooke 2019). In 1946, for example, the Muslim League ordered a “direct Action Day” that triggered murderous religious rioting in Calcutta, leaving more than 4,000 persons dead and 100,000 homeless. When India became independent one year later, the British-mandated “Partition” of India and Pakistan led to an immensely debilitating tragedy. Within hours, the Punjab, a border state with a small Islamic majority, “erupted into flames and violence,” as “thousands of Muslims and Hindus found themselves on the assumed wrong side of the new international border” (Brown 2003: 175). As primordial fears fanned panic along the border and beyond, mass carnage ended the lives of more than 1 million Hindus and Muslims, with 15 million more displaced. After Partition, Muslims throughout India were “deeply traumatized [and] fearful of their Hindu neighbors” (Brown 2003: 224); and, during moments of internal and external crisis, Hindu Indians would often condemn Muslim citizens as “anti-national” secret sympathizers with India’s enemy Pakistan (ibid.).

Amidst their proud celebrations of national independence, the despair, shame, indeed the humiliation of the Partition trauma was publicly glossed over by leaders on both sides (Alexander 2009). Privately, however, Nehru gave voice to profound worry about how the explosive experience would affect the possibility for civil solidarity. “I could not conceive of the gross brutality and sadistic cruelty that people have indulged in,” he wrote to India’s future president, Rajendra Prasad (Nehru 1947a in Brown 2003: 176). Framing Hindu revivalism as “the narrowest communalism” (Nehru 1947b in Brown 2003: 175), Nehru described it as “the exact replica of the narrow Muslim communalism which we have tried to combat for so long” (ibid., italics added); he feared “that this narrow sectarian outlook will do grave injury [to] the high ideals” of independence (ibid.). Decades later, when public debates and personal testimonies from the Partition trauma finally surfaced, along with public debates about its causes and consequences, Nehru’s dark premonitions had seemed to come true. Alok Bhalla, editor of Stories about the Partition of India, worried that Partition had forced Indians on both sides “to leave behind a human world … in return [for] an empty allegory of religious community” (Bhalla 1994: xxii); Dipesh Chakrabarty linked Partition violence to “the persistence of religion and caste in post-independence India” (2002: 6); Gyanendra Pandey traced Partition’s effects to a “narrow and diminishing view of nationalism” (1997: 3); and Rajeev Bhargava believed Partition had promoted a trope of “communal fanaticism” that “left no space for relatively impersonal principles that could prevent reasonable disagreements from degenerating into hostility” (2000: 199). For decades, Partition had lain like a festering wound in the Indian collective consciousness. Eventually, the sentiments it provoked would provide fertile ground that Hindutva movements cultivated as they moved forcefully from religion into politics, challenging the civil solidarity of India’s democratic state.

Cultural Backlash and Political (de)Formation

The primordial inversions of the cultural foundations for civil solidarity traced in the preceding pages have shaped the meanings of social life for many millions of Indians, but they did not, in themselves, shut out the more cosmopolitan and universalistic understandings of millions of others, e.g., the “argumentative Indians” whom Amartya Sen (2005) portrays in his defense of deliberative democracy in India. A culture of critical discourse (Gouldner 1979) continues to proliferate alongside such independent cultural institutions as opinion polls, self-regulating secular universities, professional journalism, and fictional media, both literary and filmic, telling stories about open, embracing, and supra-religious social relationships inside contemporary Indian cinema (Dickey 1993; Sen 2017; Damodaran 2018b; Darshan 2019; Damodaran and Gorringe 2020).

It was far from inevitable, in other words, that the nativistic backlash culture of Hindutva would ascend the heights of national political power, much less assume the overweening status that, despite the encouraging results of the just completed 2024 elections, it continues to occupy today. While its long march to state power had cultural roots, roots alone do not a tall tree make. Democratic and anti-democratic cultural meanings are highly generalized; they have to be funneled and specified through regulatory institutions before they provide access to state power; only then can they even begin the effort to regulate social life in one or another ideological way. In the transition from cultural power in the civil sphere to political position in the state, the regulatory institution of elections is central. Only if election machinery is independent of ideological control can civil power register legitimately. Despite the perambulations of India’s civil sphere and politics, the independence of its electoral machinery, the faith of the masses of Indians in the efficacy of their votes and the integrity of those counting them, has remained remarkably intact. This, in itself, is a paradoxical demonstration of the continuing vitality of civil power in India.

While regulative institutions of the civil sphere, like office and law, remain at some remove from the communicative mobilization that dynamizes public opinion, political parties are, by contrast, intimately responsive to it. Because they aim to win state power for their particular ideological candidate, political parties are much less concerned to maintain a generalizing solidarity: their intent, indeed their obligation, is to sharpen