Abstract
Lisa Mitchell, Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections. Ranikhet: Permanent Black and Ashoka University, 2023. 320 pp. ₹695.
In this book, Lisa Mitchell provides us with the theory of the practices of ‘doing democracy’. Though the arguments in the book about ‘hailing the state’ are drawn from Indian experience, particularly her fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana region of South India, Mitchell claims that theoretical insights drawn from them are applicable to other parts of the world. Her goal is to uncover the limits of the dominant theories of liberal democracy and its competing variants in contemporary times. Mitchell’s argument is that theories of democracy can be better appraised through analysing the role of ‘collective assemblies’ shaping its everyday experience and existence between elections rather than by studies based on citizens’ participation during elections.
Mitchell unpacks the ideas of civility/uncivil, public/political and individual/collective speech-action associated with the understanding and experience of the state as an ‘institution’ and ‘space’ in the ordinary lives of the historically marginalized citizens in India. Mitchell also problematizes the dominant understanding of the ideological hegemony of the liberal-democratic state in shaping the normative ordering of society by critiquing Althusser, Foucault, Marx, Engels and Gramsci, noting that citizens view the state as a legitimate instrument of social change and that they are neither ‘co-opted’ nor ‘passive ideological subjects’. According to Mitchell, this provides us with a vivid and complex reimagining and mediations of state-society relations through the politics of collective assemblies. Mitchell suggests that collective assemblies create ‘conditions’ for recognition, as opposed to recognition as a political outcome, for historically marginalized citizens, in ‘amplifying’ their shared interests and demand to make the state accountable and inclusive.
The book is organized into seven chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter deals with the conceptual shift in the meanings of sit-ins (dharnas) in the eighteenth century—as a dispute resolution mechanism between private parties—to its nineteenth-century understanding of the state being the primary target. She argues that the nineteenth-century politics of collective assemblies reinvigorates this democratic practice in contemporary times. She further argues that the practice of sit-ins is deployed by less powerful people against the more powerful in the society to seek public attention and their desire to be heard.
In the next chapter, the author analyses the theoretical debates around the perceived notions of civility reflected in the discourses on the political mobilization of minority or historically marginalized groups, and critiques the dominant idea of civility understood as ‘difference’ in terms of elites/subaltern groups ‘style/culture’ of doing politics. She argues that forms of political communication are ‘available to all’ and departs from the argument laid down by Partha Chatterjee that the strategies and tactics of historically marginalized groups termed as ‘subalterns’ are different from the elite. Mitchell argues instead that the modes of political communication of historically excluded groups for access to representation, inclusion and recognition depend on the response of the state authorities. She departs here from the theoretical framework offered by Ranajit Guha and Eric Hobsbawm in understanding popular democratic politics as resistance to the existing state sovereignty. She looks at the political mobilizations of the historically marginalized groups as their attempt to draw the attention of the state towards them and make the state accountable to recognize their status as its full and equal citizens.
The third chapter develops a response to the critique of deliberative and agonistic models of democracies suggested by thinkers like John Dryzek and Chantal Mouffe, Mitchell argues that these theories fall short of understanding the ‘conditions’ which allow individual speech action to be recognized and heard. She argues that the failure of individual speech action being heard sometimes creates possibilities of politics of collective assemblies. The next chapter takes up the comparative study of general strikes in Britain and India and the author here problematizes the historical common sense reflected in the works of Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, David Hardiman and R. R. Diwakar that the politics of civil society to check state power was a feature of European industrial societies. She enriches the understanding of civil society and its relationship with democracy by analysing general strikes in India, from the seventeenth century to the present, and argues that they were non-violent, peaceful and covered vast geographical areas in terms of claim-making directed towards the state.
In Chapters 5 and 6, she examines the politics of claim-making in the infrastructural public space of ‘road and railway networks’, redrawing the boundaries of the political that was earlier constituted through ‘print and visual cultures of representation’. These chapters show that the exercise of discretionary powers by railway officials in the colonial and post-colonial eras determined forms of collective assemblies as ‘criminal’ or ‘political’, by responding to them depending on ‘who is engaging in a particular action’. The longer genealogies of the practice of alarm-chain pulling and pilgrimage to sites of power, discussed in Chapters 5 and 7, show that their origins lie in the political strategies of the educated elite, thus debunking the idea that modes of political communication are dependent on the particularities of pre-existing social identities.
This book achieves a remarkable feat in developing a historically nuanced understanding of the democratic politics of historically marginalized citizens who adopt practices such as sit-ins and hunger strikes; petitioning the authorities; general strikes, rail and road blockades; ticketless travels in trains to the sites of power; alarm-chain pulling and people’s roar assemblies, through multi-sited ethnography of these practices. Mitchell has ingeniously interpreted these practices, to build a robust understanding of actually existing and functional democracies, and in doing so she creatively engages with the dominant global scholarship on theories of democracy in philosophy, literature and social sciences. However, the book would have added to its richness if it had delved a little more on the existing threats to Indian democracy that it faces from the resurgent right-wing populism, but the book successfully narrates the story of enchantment and longing for the democratic state in the lives of historically marginalized citizens in India.