Democracy as an ideal appears to be a chimera in the Indian context. Seen particularly from the Dalit lens the procedures involved in a democracy, such as the electoral system, look like a cruel betrayal of the promise of social-political emancipation. The Ideal of Equality which was the promise of postcolonial democracies such as India seems like an impossible dream. The book under review aims to convince the reader of the impossibility of substantive democracy for the marginalized groups in India. Michael A Collins has spent almost 10 years in the State of Tamil Nadu observing, living, interviewing and studying closely with the Dalit leaders and other related politicians to understand the actual dynamic of electoral politics in the State. Collins studied the ‘Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK)’ (Liberation Panthers Party) which started as Dalit Panther Iyakkam (DPI) in 1982 as a militant political movement to fight for the rights of Dalits. As a movement, it was assertive, rights-based and a confrontational form of Dalit politics. It did so through boycotts of elections, mass protests, legal interventions and street confrontations with dominant castes and State officials. Its original stance was that elections renew caste power and a deep suspicion of the State that framed democracy as structurally hostile to Dalits. However, in 1999 the VCK entered electoral politics by what the author calls ‘forced strategic adaptation’ to survive politically. The book demonstrates with rich empirical detail and subtle background theorizing the limitations of liberal democracy and its specific avatar in India.
One of the main arguments of the book is that the ‘inclusivity’ rationale of liberal electoral politics and its deployment by upper caste ideologues is a containment strategy to disempower Dalit liberation struggles and aspirations. The traditional Marxist term for this is ‘co-option’. Another important argument offered in the book is that procedural democracy is inherently skewed towards the dominant castes or groups in any political democracy. Ambedkar warned about it presciently and demanded special mechanisms to design procedural democracy which acts as a counterweight to the inherent advantage enjoyed by powerful groups in a society. The demand for separate electorates was a just demand unfairly opposed by Gandhi acting as a representative of the upper-caste Hindus in the name of inclusion. He is what Ambedkar says and rightly quoted by Collins, ‘Even if a seat is reserved for a minority, a majority can always pick up a person belonging to the minority and put him up as a candidate for the reserved seat as against a candidate put up by the minority and get him elected by helping its nominee with the superfluous voting strength which is at its command. The result is that the representative of the minority elected to the reserved seat instead of being a champion of the minority is really the slave of the majority.’
The book with its mixed hybrid methods proves that Ambedkar was right all along and largely ignored by the upper-caste academia and intellectuals and their French collaborators. Collins writes, ‘since the 1980s, the overall tenor of scholarship on Indian democracy has been generally optimistic, heralding the democratization of its once exclusive political arena. Touting a “silent revolution” and “democratic upsurge”, these studies examined elections as a quantitative exercise and measured their impact through the changing demographics of elected office.’
Moving from academic to the media which also represents the dominant caste groups’ interests as the nation’s interests, the book critiques the way elections and their outcomes are articulated and portrayed largely as a ‘zero sum game’ or ‘a winner takes it all’ ignoring the dynamic, aspirational and normative motives of the electorate. The theatricality and the triumphalist nature of the reporting of electoral outcomes or simply put, results which include political analysts, psephologists and other ‘political pundits’, set the narrative and deliberate in such a manner that completely ignores the interests of the Dalits in the country. In this sense, the author is critical of Western celebratory discourses on the idea of ‘deliberative democracy’ and its importation amongst Indian academia. Through his ethnographic analysis the author also shows how Dalit leaders and activists use non-deliberative tactics like staging a dharna, stopping trains strategically, etc., to bring to the attention of the local administration and political class the concerns of Dalits by and large.
The book also offers a subtle but powerful critique of quantitative analysis in Political Science which focuses on data analysis and datasets. It goes by the name of Psephology which employs a quantitative study of elections through vote shares, seat conversions, turnout rates, and demographic shifts which occupies a privileged position in contemporary analysis of Indian democracy. Psephological reasoning produces what it implicitly treats as a ‘verdict narrative’. Elections are framed and understood as decisive moments that deliver conclusive judgments on political legitimacy, popular will, and democratic health. Once results are declared, democracy is said to have ‘spoken’, and further critique is rendered redundant or normatively suspect. This verdict-oriented mode of analysis systematically collapses process into outcome. By focusing on whether Dalit parties like the VCK win seats, increase vote share, or enter governing coalitions, psephological discourse obscures the conditions under which participation occurs. Structural exclusions like caste hierarchies, dependence on dominant parties for resources, asymmetrical coalition bargaining, media marginalization, and the everyday violence that circumscribes Dalit political mobilization are rendered analytically invisible because they do not register neatly in electoral data sets. Elections are thus treated as neutral measuring devices rather than as institutionally skewed arenas to maintain the illusion of democracy.
We move on to the important issue of Dalit agency and Dalit moral responsibility; particularly of the (so called) Dalit leaders. The book although overtly does not aim to deal with this question but provides cues to answering it. There is a dominant narrative which goes by the explanation that the principal betrayers of Dalits are Dalit representatives. In other words, Dalits themselves are the cause of their Dalitness. This is shared largely by the Liberal-Left which includes some privileged Dalit groups. This victim blaming produces an a/effect that is debilitating to the Dalits involved in emancipatory struggles. The book demonstrates that the apparent betrayal happens largely for structural reasons, not for the individual moral failings of Dalit leaders. Dalit leaders who largely represent a socially and economically weak community (a whole chapter is dedicated to show the role of money in elections and its debilitating role) are forced to concede to certain demands by the local dominant caste group/s and compromise on Dalit rights in order to have a fighting chance in the process. In simple words, the upper castes have adopted a process of dominating the lives of Dalits in which the final blame goes on to Dalits themselves in the name of democracy. This domination is total, and academia is largely complicit in these processes.
The book is a valuable contribution to the study of the relationship between political procedures and domination often referred to as indirect discrimination. Although it aims to show that predicament of Dalit political parties in the state of Tamil Nadu, the arguments and demonstrations can be mapped onto other contexts where the process of marginalization is underway. The book is a must read to all those who are interested in emancipatory struggles globally and Dalits in particular.
Krishna Swamy Dara is an Associate Professor, Political Science, Department of Political Science, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.