Politics as Interpretation

John Echeverri-Gent and Kamal Sadiq’s ‘Introduction’ synthesizes the understandings of the volume’s contributors into an interpretive analytical framework that builds upon the Rudolphs’ seminal insights. It elaborates the implications of the Rudolphs’ concept of ‘situated knowledge’ by depicting it in terms of the meanings and motivations constructed by people embedded in a field that is structured by social relations, time, place, and culture. Analyzing how actors translate contextual circumstances into meaning and motive is central to explaining how they choose strategies for action. Investigation of this interpretive process illuminates the importance of discourse, emotions, and political leadership in shaping the construction of meaning. The chapter elaborates the methodological implications of the interpretive approach including: the importance of interviewing, narrative analysis, and a reflexive approach to scholars’ knowledge claims which takes into account the positionality of the researcher and the researched and the manner in which their mutual interpretation shapes their knowledge claims.

Centrism, Political Leadership, and the Future of Indian Politics

Echeverri-Gent and Sadiq investigate the implications of the Rudolphs’ scholarship for the challenges of contemporary Indian politics. They contend that two of the Rudolphs’ most seminal, but contradictory, contributions help explain India’s transformational change under Narendra Modi and the National Democratic Alliance government. The authors apply the Rudolphs’ contentions that India’s social pluralism produces centrist politics and their innovative study of transformational political leadership to the 2014 and 2019 general elections and the NDA government. They show how the multilayered nature of Modi’s political leadership enables the prime minister to accommodate the forces of centrism while transforming India’s political mainstream. They show how the ascendance of Modi has simultaneously positioned the BJP at the centre of India’s political system while transforming Indian democracy in majoritarian and illiberal directions.

From Gandhi to Modi

Amrita Basu utilizes the Rudolphs’ analysis of Gandhi to develop a better understanding of Narendra Modi’s political leadership and charismatic leadership more generally. She observes that both Gandhi and Modi possess profound psychological insights into the ethos of their era. Both used strategic reinterpretation of religion to craft scripts that spoke to people’s emotions and daily experience. Basu shows that Gandhi and Modi also exhibit profound differences. For Gandhi, change began with the individual. Modi and the RSS devalue the individual and emphasize the community. Gandhi deeply opposed strong, centralized state institutions, while Modi has concentrated power in the central government’s executive while curtailing institutional checks on it. Basu points out, both Gandhi and Modi ‘are as much the products of their environment as the architects who design it’, a fact that highlights the importance of historical context in enabling the emergence and efficacy of political leaders.

Dominant Castes, from Bullock Capitalists to OBCs?

Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan examines surprising changes in agrarian mobilization in the last decade. After decades of opposing affirmative action, dominant castes are mobilizing to demand affirmative action for themselves. Jaffrelot and Kalaiyaasan show that limited employment generation outside of agriculture, along with agricultural stagnation, has led to economic differentiation among the dominant castes. At the same time, reservations for Other Backward Classes and Dalits have enabled the upper echelons of these groups to earn livelihoods that are more desirable than those of many of the less affluent dominant castes. Members of the dominant castes have responded by demanding to be reclassified as OBCs so that they become eligible for reservations. Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan observe that as economic differentiation continues, it will be interesting to see whether mobilization along caste lines persists or whether rural political mobilization enters a new era.

In Pursuit of Saraswati

Niraja Gopal Jayal examines the politics of India’s higher education. She revisits the Rudolphs’ (1972) seminal study which explores the politicization of higher education, including the state’s active role during the early decades of the post-colonial era. Jayal highlights the irony that at a time when neoliberal ideologies suggest the roll back of state intervention and the diminution of the political sphere, higher education has become more politicized than ever. Jayal’s discussion of increased regulation by the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education, and the Ministry of Human Resources shows how these agencies have hamstrung higher education in recent years. In the name of accountability, the Indian state has increasingly micromanaged higher education in ways that have limited academic freedom and, all too often, substituted partisan for public interest.

Interpretivism in Motion

Vivienne Schmidt discusses the Rudolph’s development of their interpretative approach in the context of the spirited debates about epistemology and social science inquiry. She builds upon the Rudolphs’ approach to elaborate ‘discursive institutionalism’, a mode of analysis that theorizes the nature of discourse and how discursive exchange contributes to political action and institutional change. Schmidt’s chapter advances beyond most discursive analyses by theorizing ‘ideational power’, or the capacity of actors to use ideas to: influence other actors’ normative and cognitive beliefs; control the meaning and normative value of ideas; and structure discourse by controlling its agenda. Ultimately, Schmidt makes a cogent case for methodological pluralism in the study of ideas, one that can engage and even synthesize a range of analytical approaches.

Situated Knowledge, the Construction of Meaning, and Political Action

This chapter has drawn from the work of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph to elaborate an interpretative approach to political analysis. It began by showing that the Rudolphs’ work is deeply rooted in the writings of Max Weber, a scholar who, like the Rudolphs, was concerned with embedding a more complex and human model of decision-making in the understandings of social context. Next, the authors synthesized insights from the Rudolphs’ corpus of work into an interpretative analytical framework. They began by showing how the Rudolphs’ interpretative approach offers a richer and more complex understanding of social context. Then, they highlighted the importance of human intermediation between context and action by insisting that political action required people to formulate reasons to motivate their action or inaction. The situated-knowledge model elaborated in this chapter accounts for the idiosyncrasies of individual and local practice while enabling contingent generalizations across cases.

Civil–Military Relations and Democratic Stability

Steven Wilkinson builds on the Rudolphs’ (1964) seminal analysis of India’s civilian–military relations to explain why India, in contrast to many other countries, has succeeded in preventing military intervention in domestic politics. He reviews recent concerns arising from the efforts by retired military leaders to become involved in politics, the widespread mobilization among India’s three million veterans by leaders of the ‘One Rank One Pension’ campaign, and disagreements between military leaders and political leaders in the Ministry of Defense. Wilkinson finds that the biggest threat to the stability of civilian–military relations results from the diminishing insulation of soldiers from conflicts and tensions in their villages, states, and the wider society due to developments in telecommunication and social media. He sees no threatening conflict on the horizon at the moment. Wilkinson views the failure to modernize conventional weapons systems as the most serious problem now confronting the military.

Interpreting the Political Economy of the Indian State

Leela Fernandes points out that the Rudolphs’ analysis challenges the ‘homogenized, de-cultured language’ of conventional political economy to incorporate the unique as well as the general. The Rudolphs utilized a constructivist approach to illuminate how class, the state, and culture historically interacted to shape the way that people give meaning to their lives and ultimately fashion their political identity and behaviour. Fernandes sees class as a dynamic product of the interaction between the state, social relations, and the language and culture that people use to make sense of their world. She shows how the structural and discursive dimensions of class interact through the daily practice of resistance by women workers, the customs and rituals of religious festivals, and the community proceedings of organizations. Fernandes argues for a synthesis of structural approaches of political economy with the cultural sensitivities of area studies.

Does Class Matter in Politics?

Agarwala and Herring make the important observation that our view of class politics is often skewed by a misleading preoccupation with the patterns of class politics that arose in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. They develop this point by analysing the rise of India’s informal workers and its agrarian producers. After decades of being excluded from the formal labour movement, self-employed workers, domestic workers, recycling and sanitation workers, and home-based garment workers have organized to gain legal recognition as workers and secure new forms of labour protection. In agriculture, despite the political decline of ‘bullock capitalists’ in recent years, Agarwala and Herring analyse a new basis for agrarian mobilization—the right to grow genetically engineered Bt cotton. Their analysis of these cases shows that the mutual constitution of class, caste, and local culture affects the success and direction of political mobilization.