Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables, Map and Charts
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- Acronyms
- Introduction: Against False Binaries
- 1 The Perspectives of the Study: Towards an Agonistics of Democracy
- 2 Political Spaces: Institutional Opportunity Structures
- 3 Political Spaces: Social Relations of Power
- 4 From Clientelism to Citizenship?: The Politics of Supplications
- 5 From Moral Vocabularies to Languages of Stateness?: The Politics of Demands
- 6 From Backwardness to Improvement?: The Politics of Disputation
- 7 From Tradition to Modernity?: The Politics of Imagination
- Conclusion: The Politics of the Poor: Agonistic Negotiations with Democracy
- Annexure 1 The Dramatis Personae, 2009–10
- Annexure 2 The Census Survey
- Annexure 3 The Multidimensional Poverty Index
- Annexure 4 Schedule for BPL Census 2002
- Annexure 5 Schedule for BPL Census 2002 West Bengal
- Annexure 6 BPL Cutoff List for West Bengal
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: The Politics of the Poor: Agonistic Negotiations with Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables, Map and Charts
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- Acronyms
- Introduction: Against False Binaries
- 1 The Perspectives of the Study: Towards an Agonistics of Democracy
- 2 Political Spaces: Institutional Opportunity Structures
- 3 Political Spaces: Social Relations of Power
- 4 From Clientelism to Citizenship?: The Politics of Supplications
- 5 From Moral Vocabularies to Languages of Stateness?: The Politics of Demands
- 6 From Backwardness to Improvement?: The Politics of Disputation
- 7 From Tradition to Modernity?: The Politics of Imagination
- Conclusion: The Politics of the Poor: Agonistic Negotiations with Democracy
- Annexure 1 The Dramatis Personae, 2009–10
- Annexure 2 The Census Survey
- Annexure 3 The Multidimensional Poverty Index
- Annexure 4 Schedule for BPL Census 2002
- Annexure 5 Schedule for BPL Census 2002 West Bengal
- Annexure 6 BPL Cutoff List for West Bengal
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For the poor the economic is the spiritual. You cannot make any other appeal to those starving millions. It will fall flat on them. But you take food to them and they will regard you as their God. They are incapable of any other thought.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1927Men (sic) make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
Karl Marx, 1852To say that ‘democracy’ is a hotly contested concept is to parrot a cliché. Democracy realists (Przeworski, 1991) warn us of overloading the term with too many meanings. The proliferation of definitions of democracy with adjectives and characteristics of all sorts has led scholars to articulate legitimate anxieties about stretching the concept of democracy to such an extent as to render it analytically meaningless. Against minimalist and maximalist views, and advocating somewhat of a middle-range perspective, Terry Lyn Karl (1990) suggests that democracy be conceived of an institutional arrangement in which competitive elections are complemented by mechanisms to hold elected representatives accountable to the rule of law. Reiterating this view, Marc Plattner (1998) makes a case for emphasizing the compact between liberalism and democracy.
Chantal Mouffe disagrees. She directs attention to the fraught conceptual histories between liberalism and democracy to support her argument that there is in fact no necessary relation between the two (Mouffe, 2000). In similar vein, David Beetham suggests that democracy refers at once to ‘control by citizens over their collective affairs, and equality between citizens in the exercise of that control’ (Beetham, 1999, 3). Likewise, Huber et al., (1997) suggest equal participation in public affairs as one of the characteristics of substantive democracy. The collapse of the so-called ‘people's democracies’ and the concomitant ascendance of Liberal democracy during the 1990s not only provided a favourable intellectual climate for the flourishing of liberal rights, but also made Liberal democracy susceptible to egalitarian claims (Schmitter, 1994). Based on these somewhat contradictory insights, we have a fragmentary conceptualization of democracy that include rather disparate characteristics: competitive elections, the guarantee of civil liberties and individual rights, protection of private property and establishment of the rule of law on the one hand, and equal participation of people in the affairs that matter to them on the other.
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- Politics of the PoorNegotiating Democracy in Contemporary India, pp. 396 - 418Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017