Neo-Liberal Strategies of Governing India by Ranabir Samaddar

Author:Ranabir Samaddar [Samaddar, Ranabir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, Political Science, World, Asian, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
ISBN: 9781317199687
Google: fAU9DAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30423993
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

These are indications of a situation in which parties slowly transform or at least half-transform into some sort of machinery, at times a business machine. The culture of government as a state machine dedicated to mobilization of resources overwhelms the party. In all parties therefore we find quarrels between the conflicting calculations of how much to give importance to ideology and how much to governmentalize the party itself. The tussle drags the issue of legitimacy: how much to draw legitimacy from ideology and campaign as people’s organ and how much to draw legitimacy from being the site of governance? Again, what will the party do with the implications of changing locations of the party, such as the party at the state level and panchayat level, or how to secure popular consent and involve people as party followers in governmental programmes, yet keep them disciplined and controlled, and therefore the million rupee issue: how much to keep the party open and mass based, and how much to keep it cadre based, and thus keep it disciplined? From this emerges one of the most controversial questions for the party, namely the nature, modality and extent of its membership drive. In these eternal calculations as reflecting market calculations in public politics, we can witness the periodic flare up of a tussle between the organizational wing and the governmental (variously called as the ministerial or the parliamentary) wing of the party – a tussle that in fact now becomes continuous.

Again in each party, because of the federal nature of the polity where it has share of governmental power at some level, we have the organizational and governmental wings cuttings across each other in their respective journeys. This is commonly known as the conflict between national and local visions. Again, in each party, the governmental wing says, the party must stick to its business of spreading organization by spreading its ideology, and it must do constructive work (in Congress spinning khadi was one such symbol, in the communist party spreading party message through mass organizations it wants to control has been the style, in BJP constructive work would be done through participating in the RSS work of Swadeshi) and not meddle much in governmental business, because the governmental wing is there to take care of administration. And in each party, the organizational wing says to the former, its supervision over the ministerial wing must be accepted, because it is on the ideological-organizational work and strength of the party that the party has become the party of government. While the modern techniques of governance and development have attempted to bridge the divide, they do not at all rid the institution of the party of the contradictions emanating from modern governmentality. This was demonstrated during the transition from colonial order of rule to the post-colonial order in the late forties and the fifties, again in the post-Emergency period, yet again in the late nineties of the past century to the middle of the first decade of this century.

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