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Extensive summary of mandatory articles State & Society in Asia
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Extensive summary of mandatory articles State & Society in Asia
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SummaryClass 1 Introduction................................................................................................................................................................................ 2
Text 1/1: Democracy and authoritarianism in South Asia ................................................................................................................ 2
Class 2 Political Society and Patronage ................................................................................................................................................ 3
Text 1/2: The Politics of the Governed .............................................................................................................................................. 3
Text 2/2: Why Ethnic Parties Succeed ............................................................................................................................................... 6
Class 3 Agrarian Political Society .......................................................................................................................................................10
Text 1/2: Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy............................................................................. 10
Text 2/2: The Dark Side of Political Society: Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality ............................................. 14
Class 4 Morality and Patronage ..........................................................................................................................................................16
Text 1/2: Moral Politics in Philippines: inequality, democracy & urban poor ............................................................................... 16
Text 2/2: Patronage and Autonomy in India’s Deepening Democracy ........................................................................................... 21
Class 5 Corruption ................................................................................................................................................................................23
Text 1/2: Blurred Boundaries: Discourse of Corruption, Culture of Politics, and Imagined State................................................. 23
Text 2/2: Corruption as Power: Caste and the Political Imagination of the Postcolonial State. .................................................... 28
Class 6 Crime and Politics Part 1 ........................................................................................................................................................32
Text 1/2: Philippine Politics in Town, District and Province: Bossism in Cavite and Cebu. .......................................................... 32
Text 2/2: India working: Essays on Society and Economy. ............................................................................................................. 37
Class 7 Crime and Politics Part 2 ........................................................................................................................................................43
Text 1/2: When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics – The Costs of Democracy ..................................................... 43
Text 2/2: Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia. .................................................................................................................. 47
Class 8 Communal Violence Part 1 .....................................................................................................................................................49
Text 1/2: Rioting as Maintaining Relations: Hindu-Muslim Violence and Political Mediation in Gujarat, India. ......................... 49
Text 2/2: The Maluku Wars: Bringing Society back in. Indonesia. ................................................................................................. 53
Class 9 Communal Violence Part 2 .....................................................................................................................................................57
Text 1/2: Disciplining the Body, Disciplining the Body-Politic: Physical Culture and Social Violence among North Indian
Wrestlers. ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 57
Text 2/2: Fun and Violence. Ethnocide and the Effervescence of Collective Aggression. ............................................................... 61
Class 10 Party-Political Violence .........................................................................................................................................................65
Text 1/2: Hartal as a Complex Political Performance: General Strikes and the Organization of (local) Power in Bangladesh. .. 65
Text 2/2: Rise & Fall of Electoral Violence Thailand: Changing Rules, Structures & Power Landscapes .................................... 68
Class 11 Gender and Violence .............................................................................................................................................................72
Text 1/2: All Our Goddesses are Armed: Religion, Resistance and Revenge in the Life of a Militant Hindu Nationalist Woman . 72
Text 2/2: Reflecting on Resistance: Hindu Women ‘Soldiers’ and the Birth of Female Militancy. ................................................. 74
Class 12 Authoritarian Populism ........................................................................................................................................................78
Text 1/2: Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’: Securitization Illegal Drugs and the Return of National Boss Rule. .................................... 78
Text 2/2: We need to talk about body. ............................................................................................................................................. 80
1
,Class 1 Introduction
Text 1/1: Democracy and authoritarianism in South Asia
Author: Ayesha Jalal
Question 1: Why did a common British legacy lead to contrasting patterns of political development in
post-independence South-Asia?
Expressions of discontent are traceable to pre-independence period.
- Lack of convergence between social identities and frontiers of post-1947 modern state.
- Assertions of distinctive identities by variously defined social groupings.
o Biggest challenge to the dominant idioms deployed to sustain and legitimize post-
colonial state structures in the subcontinent.
Key defining feature of modern state (which has been undermined).
- State’s monopoly over the instruments of coercion.
Jalal’s definitions
- Democracy
o More than voting rights or free speech
o Comes from empowerment/power of the people: not as abstract legal citizens; but
rather as concrete and active agents capable of pursuing their interests with a. measure
of autonomy from entrenched structures of dominance and privilege.
o Capacity to resist and renegotiate relations of power and privilege.
- Authoritarianism
o Organized power embedded in the institutional structure of the state
o Distinguishable (though not insulated) from myriad structures of dominance lining the
larger body politic.
o Degree of its overt manifestation is contingent upon the existence or absence of formal,
much less substantive democracy.
- Democracy & Authoritarianism
o May frequently overlap
o Both anti-ethical and interdependent historical processes co-existing in tension while at
the same time informing and transforming each other.
Question 2: Why – despite divergent forms taken by their state structures – political and economic
development, and the ideological responses to them, are showing signs of convergence?
India
- Lost some key agricultural tracts, sources of raw materials for its industry and captive market
for manufactured products after the partition.
- Division of assets deprived India of civil and military personnel as well as of financial resources,
which complicated the task of resettlement of the millions fleeing East- and West-Pakistan.
- Yet: India inherited colonial state’s central government apparatus and an industrial
infrastructure.
- Formalization of democracy fixated attention on fortunes of a single, political party.
- Practices of democracy cannot be attributed to the changing societal moorings of a political
party with no mention of its implications for the overall state structure.
Pakistan
- Prolonged suspension of political processes resulted in obsessive concern with the two main
non-elected institutions of the state, the civil bureaucracy and the military.
- Supremacy of military and bureaucracy is inexplicable without reference to the complicitous
role of certain dominant social groups in eschewing the politics of resistance to gain privileged
access to state authority and patronage.
à Democracy as expressed in the formalization of regular elections can and does often co-exist with
the inherently authoritarian tendencies of the state.
à Overt authoritarianism is shaped more by institutional imbalance between the elected and non-
elected institutions of the state than by changing in the civil-military relations alone.
2
,Class 2 Political Society and Patronage
Text 1/2: The Politics of the Governed
Author: Partha Chatterjee
Mid 1970’s: two key men in the colony: Adhir Mandal & Haren Manna.
- Dealt with railway authorities, police, other government agencies on behalf of ‘the colony’ (aka
the refugee settlements)
- Known as landlord of the rail colony
Early 1980’s: new trend
- New leader: Anadi Bera;
o Was called ‘The Master’ as he ran primary school
o Chief organizer of resistance
o Set up ‘Kalyan Samiti: The People’s Welfare Association’
§ Goals: starting a new medical center and library
ICDS: Integrated Child Development Scheme
= major health and literacy program for children in urban slums
- Bera’s initiative to open a child-care unit at the rail colony
- Immunize children against several sicknesses, provides daily snacks, has trained staff to run the
play school, provides counseling to parents, etc. They also have a detailed record of livelihoods
of health, consumption and income of every family in the colony.
- This is one example of how residents of a squatter’s colony could organize to get themselves
identified on a distinct population group that could receive the benefits of a governmental
program.
- Not only instance à residents now use this collective form to deal with other governmental
agencies (police, NGOs, municipal authorities, political parties, etc.)
Equally crucial part of politics of the governed: they need to give to empirical form of a population
group the moral attributes of a community.
- In case or rail colony: no pre-given communal form readily available to them.
- Community here was built from scratch.
- When leading members of association speak about colony and its struggles:
o They do not talk about shared interests of the members.
o But: They describe the community in terms of a shared kinship
à “We are all a single family”
The ‘family’:
- Not any prior biological or cultural affinity that defines this family.
- Collective occupation of a piece of land – a territory defined in time and space and one that is
under threat.
- Defined by territorial limits of colony à “The other side of the bridge is another neighborhood
(…) We don’t cross the limits”.
- Within fam: much internal variety (f.ex. diversity in jobs)
- Community life: also sustained by collective viewing of TV shows/videos, sports activities and
religious festivals.
3
, People’s Welfare Association (created by residents of Rail Colony Gate N° 1)
- Not an association of civil society.
- Collective violation of property laws and civic regulations.
- State cannot recognize it as having the same legitimacy as other civic associations pursuing
more legitimate objective.
- Squatters admit that their occupation of public land is both illegal and contrary to good civic
life.
o However: they make claim to habitation and livelihood as matter of right and use their
association as principal collective instrument to pursue that claim.
- Appealing to moral rhetoric of a community striving to build a decent social life under extremely
harsh conditions while at same time affirming the duties of good citizenship.
- Categories of governmentality were being invested with the imaginative possibilities of
community, including its capacity to invent relationship of kinship, to produce a new, even if
somewhat hesitant, rhetoric of political claims.
Governmentality always operates on a heterogenous social field, on multiple population groups and with
multiple strategies. Here: no equal and uniform exercise of the rights of citizenship
à thus quite possible for equilibrium of strategic politics to shift enough for these squatters to be evicted
tomorrow.
Not every population group is able to operate successfully in political society and even when it is, its
successes are often temporary.
Examples:
a. Giarahat – heart of middle-class South-Calcutta
b. College Street – organized group that failed to make headway in political society
c. Daftaripara – collective identity of bookbinders
Role of teachers
- Traditional landlord class removed from political scene à teachers became crucial to new
politics of consensus.
- Had will and ability to find commonly acceptable solutions to local disputes.
- Were salaried à Not dependent on agricultural incomes à not really interested in land.
- Sympathetic to the poor, educated among society & familiar of language of peasants and that
of the party, also well versed in legal and administrative procedures.
- Mediate between those who govern and those who are governed.
- Crucial in the implementation of governmental policies in the countryside.
o Interceded with bureaucracy, using language of administration, but claiming to speak
on behalf of the poor.
o Explained government policy and admin decisions to people of village
- Trust: gone. They developed own entrenched interest within power structure. Who is next
mediator?
Chatterjee’s POV1
- Rural poor who mobilize to claim the benefits of various governmental programs do not do so
as members of civil society. To effectively direct those benefits towards them, they must succeed
in applying the right pressure at the right place in the governmental machinery à frequently
means bending or stretching of rules, because existing procedures have historically worked to
exclude/marginalize them. They must succeed in mobilizing population groups to produce a
local political consensus that can effectively work against the distribution of power in society
as a whole.
- When mobilization of political society to secure benefits of governmental programs for poor
and underprivileged population groups successful à actual expansion of freedoms of people
enabled by political society, that would not have been ordinarily possible within civil society.
4
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