The poverty of political imagination needs remedy, not mourning

By Yogendra Yadav :

What is political theory? Who is a political thinker? How can anyone pronounce the death of political thought? These and many other interesting questions have come my way in response to the opening piece in this column (“Where are our political thinkers?”, IE, August 18). The overwhelming response — articles, social media posts and personal communications — confirms that this question was waiting to be asked. These first set of reactions also suggest that the question needs to be spelt out further.

Let me begin by clarifying what is this “political thought” whose decline I bemoan. It refers to a wide range of political reflections that go beyond day-to-day political commentary, ideological polemic or policy prescriptions. This form of thinking begins with here and now, but takes a step back to offer general answers to three large questions.

One, where do we want to go? What kind of political order do we wish to create? This is a normative question that involves political vision. Two, where do we stand today? How close or distant are we from the desired destination? This is an empirical question that requires political analysis, an understanding of the cause-effect relationship. Three, what is to be done? How do we go from where we are to where we wish to reach? This is a prescriptive question that demands political judgement that translates into political strategy and tactics. Political thinkers respond to all these questions for their desh and kaal. Call it by any name — political theory, political philosophy, political ideology or political imagination — this form of thinking about politics is necessary for any meaningful political action.

Modern India had developed a tradition of political thought in this sense. We had a vast range of political thinkers across the ideological spectrum who offered general and interconnected answers to all these three questions in their own ways and thus helped us to make sense of our past, present and future. Unlike Europe, most of our “thinkers” were political activists. Unlike today, most of them were deeply rooted in their languages. They were exposed to, and freely drew upon, modern western ideas, but they filtered these with their regional context and nationalist sensibilities. “Modern Indian Political Thought” is this repository of ideas-in-contest. It laid the basis of our anti-colonial struggle, our Constitution and post-colonial politics. After flourishing for about a century — say, from the 1870s to 1960s — this tradition met with a precipitous decline, if not a sudden death. The poverty of political imagination, understanding and judgement in today’s India is a result of this atrophy.

There are exceptions to this general trend. I had mentioned three “living” strands of modern Indian political thought — feminism, social justice and critiques of “development”. Feminist debates on the Indian specificity of patriarchy and struggles against it, on how gender intersects with caste and class, on the limits of law and state as progressive forces and LGBTQ rights in the Indian context, have opened our political imagination way beyond the “women’s question” in nationalist thought.

Though discussions on social justice have yet to move beyond the shadow of Babasaheb Ambedkar, debates on parallels between caste and race, the political economy of caste and issues of pasmanda Muslims and Mahadalits are forcing open new doors. The rich and grounded debates on the pluriverse of alternatives to “development” have now moved beyond the shadow of Mahatma Gandhi and could guide our thinking not just on ecology but also on the new economic and political order. Yet, all these, even when put together, do not fill the vast vacuum left by the decline of modern Indian political thought.

This basic argument has been generally recognised and accepted by most responses to my article. Nitin Pai (“Why Independent India has not produced great political thinkers?” Mint, August 25) agrees with this assessment and has taken the next step in this dialogue by offering his explanation of why this may have happened. I hope to follow up on this. Professor Ashutosh Varshney (in a personal communication) offers a corrective to my sweeping judgement of political science by pointing out that the analysis of Indian politics has advanced and that the academic discipline must not be burdened with offering a vision for change. That, in a sense, is my point: The science of politics cannot replace the business of making sense of politics and cultivating our political sensibility. Professor Shruti Kapila (in a post on X) offers a sharp disagreement: “Political ideas and thought [are] very much alive and kicking just not in the usual places or by the same old players”. This is an intriguing suggestion and promises a fruitful dialogue as and when it is substantiated.

Much of the first round of responses has focused on the names of thinkers that I had picked up to illustrate my argument. On this count, I plead guilty. Some of the criticism stems from misunderstanding the scope of my examples. I began with those thinkers who were alive in 1947 (hence no Jyotiba Phule or Gopal Krishna Gokhale). And I had deliberately excluded any reference to the many sharp social and political theorists who happen to be my contemporaries (apologies to all scholar and activist friends). The list was ideology neutral and included Hindutva and Islamic thinkers I have little sympathy for.

I had also limited myself to political thought in a more limited sense (hence no social theorist like Andre Beteille, J P S Uberoi, Imtiaz Ahmed or Veena Das, or philosophers like Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi or writers like Nirmal Verma and Raghuvir Sahay). Yet the criticism (by Professor Nandini Sundar, among others) about the omission of women thinkers like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Aruna Asaf Ali and Sarojini Naidu is a valuable corrective to my list. On second thoughts, I should have also included E M S Namboodiripad in the post-Independence thinkers, D R Nagaraj and Claude Alvares in the next generation and Aruna Roy, Dilip Simeon, Vandana Shiva, Devanoora Mahadeva and Anand Teltumbde as living examples of what I have characterised as political thought. An indictment of political science must make a reference to an earlier generation of professors — Randhir Singh, Rasheeduddin Khan, Ram Bapat, Shanti Swaroop, Raghavendra Rao and Manoranjan Mohanty, who kept a connect between political science and political sense.

I am deeply aware that I must be ignorant of many more thinkers, especially those who write in languages that I don’t read. But I hope such omissions are my limitations, not the limitations of the basic argument that I have put forward. The purpose of initiating this debate is not just to recognise and mourn the “death” of political thought, but to invite collective deliberation on why we reached this place, and what can be done to reinvigorate this lifeline of our republic. May we turn to that now?