Political representation in India: Enlarging the perspective

ABSTRACT

Democratic theory has recently been marked by a renewed interest in political representation that is manifest in, and proceeds from, a series of theoretical works that radically open up the concept of representation. This introductory article briefly presents some of the key theoretical propositions that are brought forward by this body of literature, but also by anthropological works on South Asia, namely (i) the intrinsic plurality of the meanings and forms of political representation; (ii) the centrality and pervasiveness of representation processes in political life; and (iii) the constructivist dimension of political representation. As I introduce the four papers in this Special Issue, which collectively demonstrate the heuristic value of an engagement with such debates to understand contemporary Indian politics, I insist that what is at stake is not so much a “crisis” of political representation as a series of events and evolutions that question received knowledge about political representation in India.

Democratic theory has recently been marked by a “‘rediscovery’ of representation,”¹ which came after several decades of intense focus on participation, and more lately on deliberation—two dimensions that seemed to offer brighter promises in terms of deepening of democracy. Indeed democracies worldwide have been diagnosed as suffering from a widely shared “crisis of representation” whose most frequent symptoms are a decreasing (or consistently low) level of electoral participation; a diminishing capacity by political parties to enroll new members, or even to keep their old ones; and a lack of trust by citizens in the political system in general and in elected representatives in particular, linked to a pervasive feeling of “misrepresentation.”²

The renewed interest in political representation is manifest in, and proceeds from, a series of theoretical works that radically open up the concept of representation. While a detailed presentation of this rich body of literature is beyond the scope of this introductory article, it might be useful to mention some of the key theoretical propositions that it brings forward. Foremost among these is Michael Saward’s elaboration of the concept of “representative claim,” through which he proposes to consider political representation as a dynamic process rather than a static relationship; to observe “what representation does, rather than what it is;”³ and to see representation as “the product of a performance.”⁴ Other important contributions are Iris Marion Young’s observation that representation is inherent even in participatory politics⁵; Nadia Urbinati and Mark Warren’s emphasis on the multiplication of “practices of representation (…) beyond electoral venues,” including in deliberative forums⁶; or Jane Mansbridge’s attention to the systemic character of political representation, “including both elected and non elected representatives, inside and outside the legislature.”⁷ To put it very briefly,⁸ what comes out of these works is a new awareness of (i) the intrinsic plurality of the meanings and forms of political representation; (ii) the centrality and pervasiveness of representation processes in political life; and (iii) the constructivist dimension of political representation, understood as an “iterative process” that works in more directions than one.⁹ Indeed, Lisa Disch argues that the study of political representation has recently gone through a “constructivist turn.”¹⁰

However, enlarging the perspective beyond American and British scholarship, but also beyond the discipline of political science, would lead to relativizing the latter assessment.¹¹ The aforementioned three features of political representation were certainly overlooked, if not absent, in the classic book of Hanna Pitkin, The concept of representation, which largely dominated scholarship on this topic since its publication in 1967.¹² As is well known, Pitkin, focusing on representation as a mandate given by the represented to their representatives in the framework of the electoral process, distinguishes between substantive representation (“acting for”) and descriptive or symbolic representation (“standing for”). But in the 1970s and 1980s already, several German and French scholars developed other approaches to political representation.¹³ I will just mention, in Germany, Hasso Hofmann, whose work in conceptual history underlined the importance of the conceptualization of representation as embodiment in the German tradition¹⁴; while in France Pierre Bourdieu offered a decisive analysis of the symbolic dimension of political representation, as he described the “symbolic takeover” enacted by the spokespersons of a group as they manifest the group’s very existence.¹⁵

In South Asian studies, a series of works also testify to the existence of an enlarged conception of political representation since the 1990s, especially among anthropologists. Thus, in a 1997 article calling for a renewal of political anthropology, Jonathan Spencer underlined the “semantic or cultural ‘emptiness’ of the idea of political representation”¹⁶; a fact that led him to call for paying more attention, especially in ethnographic work, to the many, essentially “unpredictable” forms taken by representation in South Asian politics. In this regard a fascinating case study of the multiple meanings and directions through which political representation, as a process, works, is Lucia Michelutti’s ethnographic study of the Yadavs (a caste cluster) of Mathura, a city of Uttar Pradesh. Michelutti indeed shows how Yadav caste associations have promoted a view of democracy that asserts the Yadavs’ specific affinities with it. In this view one finds both an emphasis on the politics of numbers (numbers being an asset for the Yadavs, who constitute one of the largest caste clusters in India), and a conception of the representative link between community members and their leaders (whether they are elected or not), as one of “common substance.”¹⁷ In other words the “political rhetoric” of Yadav caste associations suggests a view of representation as aggregation, but also as embodiment. Most importantly, this study shows how Yadavs’ engagement into electoral politics shapes the community as much as it ensures the representation of its interests.¹⁸

A third example of the renewed approach to political representation offered by South Asia anthropologists is Thomas Blom Hansen’s analysis of the politics of the Shiv Sena, in Mumbai, as “performance.” Hansen argues that “a politics of the spectacle”¹⁹ is central to political representation in the Indian context, where leaders will strive “to express and create community and locality through the very act of representation;”²⁰ in other words he insists, like Saward, on the performative and constructivist dimensions of political representation. One must note, however, that these works define themselves as focusing on “popular” democracy, suggesting that they are concerned mostly with “politics from below,” so to speak. By contrast, and even though “the capacity of electoral politics to forge social identities”²¹ was identified early on, the political science literature on political representation in India has remained largely focused on voting patterns, party strategies and relationships between politics in the states and in the Centre.²²

The four papers presented in this Special Issue demonstrate the heuristic value of an engagement with theoretical debates around the notion of representation to understand contemporary Indian politics, “popular” or otherwise. What is at stake here is not so much a “crisis” of political representation as a series of recent events and evolutions that question received knowledge about political representation in India.

Indeed the existence of a crisis of representation, on the lines mentioned above, is far from evident in the world’s largest democracy. To start with, electoral participation has tended to increase since the 1960s, especially at the level of state and local elections.²³ Moreover, in the early 1990s it became evident that the “socially underprivileged” had become the most active participants in elections, a phenomenon that Yogendra Yadav famously characterized as “the second democratic upsurge.”²⁴ This phase of consistent increase in the electoral participation of socio-economically marginalized voters was considered as closed with the 2004 national elections²⁵; indeed the latest contest, in 2014, was marked by a dramatic increase in overall participation (from 58 percent in 2009 to 67 percent 5 years later), due in part to the increased participation of the upper middle and middle classes (from 26 percent to 47 percent).²⁶ What calls for interpretation, therefore, is the changing social distribution of electoral participation, as much as its evolving level.

When it comes to the second usual symptom of the “crisis of representation,” namely the decreasing attractiveness of political parties, data is harder to come by in the Indian case, as there is no official information on the membership of political parties. However, with 55 parties recognized by the Election Commission of India in 2014,²⁷ and the frequent emergence of new parties on the political stage, the political party seems to remain a strong institution in the Indian context. A recent case in point is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) created in Delhi in 2012, in the wake of the Anna Hazare movement (2011–12), which proved to have an exceptional capacity to mobilize public interest: the AAP could rely, in its first three years of existence, on an army of dedicated volunteers²⁸; it managed to capture media attention well beyond its importance on the national scene; and the two elections which it contested in 2013 and 2015 (and which led it to form the government both times) were marked by an extraordinarily high level of participation.²⁹

What about Indian citizens’ trust in their representatives? Regarding this third indicator of the “crisis of representation”, the Hazare movement (that also called itself “India Against Corruption”) offered an ambiguous answer. On the one hand this mobilization,³⁰ unfolding in several megacities over more than a year to demand the establishment of a powerful “Jan Lokpal,” that is, a new institution empowered to investigate and prosecute corruption cases at all levels of political life, expressed a strongly defiant attitude vis-à-vis parliamentary politics; indeed many critics denounced the anti-democratic undertones of the movement.³¹ On the other hand, and quite unexpectedly, the Hazare movement gave birth to a new political party, the AAP, claiming its intention to “clean politics from inside”—a party that re-enchanted politics in Delhi, however briefly, twice in 3 years.

One can also note that the mobilization around the need for a Lokpal is part of a series of democratic reforms that have been recurrently demanded³² (and sometimes enacted); such reforms have included, among others, the disclosure of information regarding the educational level or the wealth of candidates in elections; the introduction of a right to recall; or the need to better control the funding of political parties. Srirupa Roy, qualifying this series of demands as pertaining to a “curative” discourse about democracy, shows that these have been part of the public debate since “the long 1970s” in India.³³ Such discourse is deeply ambiguous insofar as it expresses at the same time an intense dissatisfaction with the actual (or perceived) functioning of electoral representation, and an undying belief in the curability of democratic institutions.

Rather than a “crisis” of political representation, then, one might say that India after 2014 is confronted, as Niraja Gopal Jayal puts it in this issue, to new questions about the relationship between political representation and democracy. That year, the Lok Sabha elections were, as many commentators put it, swept by a “Modi wave”; electoral participation—especially of the middle classes—was high, as I said above, and the leading party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), riding on the popularity of its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, won enough seats to be in a position to form the government on its own—for the first time since 1984. This spectacular election, just like the Delhi state elections of 2013 and 2015 previously mentioned, raises a series of crucial theoretical and empirical questions.

For instance, should we consider that a high level of electoral participation is an index of deep democracy when those who vote the most are “entrenched”³⁴ citizens, to use James Holston’s phrase? Or when such participation goes in favor of a party promoting the idea that politics is inherently dirty? Or when it supports a charismatic leader with authoritarian tendencies?

Should we consider that the plurality of political parties signals democratic strength when the personalization of politics gets many of these parties to disappear behind their (more or less) charismatic leader?

Also, what happens to the political representation of social diversity when the charismatic leader of the victorious party offers, through his embodiment of “the people,” a unified representation that erases the variety of identities and of interests among citizens? The four papers in this issue offer important elements of an answer to this series of questions.

The first two articles have in common a focus on the electoral campaign—a moment when political representation takes on, more than ever, the quality of a spectacle; when ideas about representation are most visibly performed.

The first contribution, by Niraja Gopal Jayal, offers a reading of the 2014 national election in terms of a competition between four distinctive representative claims, respectively articulated by the Indian National Congress, social justice parties, the AAP and the BJP. On the basis of an interpretive analysis of the campaign, the author argues that this particular election made visible “a shift from one dominant type of representative claim to another.” Jayal’s article indeed demonstrates how a focus on the theories of representation that (more or less implicitly) inform the discourse and practices of political parties challenges widely shared assumptions about the democratization process at work in Indian democracy. In the Spring of 2014, she argues, the “old” representative claims of the Congress (based on a liberal view of representation) and of the parties of social justice such as the Bahujan Samaj Party or the Samajwadi Party (based on what Anne Phillips called a “politics of presence,”³⁵ i.e., an emphasis on the descriptive dimension of political representation) appeared much less compelling than the “new” representative claims of the AAP (based on a “counter-democratic”³⁶ type of populism) and of the BJP under Narendra Modi (based on realist Caesarism).

Narendra Modi is precisely at the center of the second article, which again focuses on electoral campaigns, but this time in a dynamic perspective. Christophe Jaffrelot analyses a series of political communication techniques perfected by Modi from 2002 to 2012, with a double focus on (i) the mise en scène of the leader and (ii) his political discourse. He shows how the political communication of the then Chief Minister of Gujarat successively suggested that he represents the 60 million Gujaratis in three different ways and senses: he “acts” for them; he “stands” for them; and through his appropriation of Gujarati asmita (soul, identity), he “embodies” them. One striking feature indeed is the central place of the leader’s body in his political communication: a body that is repeatedly shown or said to be strong (the famous “56 inch chest”), pure (because vegetarian), and efficient (thanks to the “Modi kurta”). Most importantly, Jaffrelot’s analysis makes clear how the emphasis on asmita, which implicitly excludes Muslims from Gujaratiness, works to “hinduize” Modi’s brand of subnationalism.

The third study precisely reflects on alternative “avenues of representation” for Indian Muslims, whose presence in the Lok Sabha touched a new low in 2014.³⁷ Gayatri Jai Singh Rathore indeed takes us to an often overlooked site of descriptive political representation: government bodies—in this case, the Department of Minority Affairs created in 2009 within the government of Rajasthan, which encompasses five bodies dedicated to minority welfare, out of which three are dedicated to Muslim affairs (the Rajasthan Board of Waqfs, the Rajasthan Haj Committee, and the Rajasthan Madrasa Board). Rathore compares two types of civil society organizations who claim to represent Muslims in the state; in so doing she examines the forms and conditions of what Peter Houtzager and Adrian Lavalle have called, in a different context, “assumed representation.”³⁸ On the basis of a comparison of these two associations’ contrasted success in having their members selected in welfare bodies, Rathore discusses the explicit and implicit criteria that inform the selection of these “alternative representatives” of the community. In line with Rupa Viswanath’s argument that one major function of the commissions set up by the Indian government over a series of issues is to “represent representation,”³⁹ Rathore’s article offers important insights into the politics of presence enacted by the government bodies under study.

This contribution, as well as the next one, thus offers fresh perspectives on the issue of group representation—a politics in which India has been a pioneer and a place of experimentation for more than a century now. These two articles consider two groups whose legitimacy as “objects” of a representative claim, to use Saward’s lexicon,⁴⁰ is being contested for different historical and political reasons: Muslims, and LGBT⁴¹/queers. Moreover, the two papers focus on representation beyond elections.

Where does the process of political representation actually begin? Virginie Dutoya’s study invites us to consider a crucial, yet often overlooked phase in the discursive process that is central to political representation: the initial phase of naming the group. On the basis of her analysis of a large corpus of publications in the field of social sciences, Dutoya identifies a series of tensions in the representation work conducted by academics with regard to “non–heterosexuals”—a group that is currently emerging as such on the Indian political stage. Indeed 2014 was a year of remobilization for the movement to repeal Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (that in effect criminalizes homosexuality), after the Supreme Court overturned, in December 2013, the decision taken by the Delhi High Court 4 years earlier in favor of decriminalization. Dutoya’s analysis, drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall, discusses, beyond the constructivist dimension of academic representation, the question of the “subjectivation effect”⁴² of naming the group: who is made visible (or invisible), legitimate (or illegitimate), empowered (or disempowered) by the different possible ways of naming non-heterosexuals as a collective? If the role of social sciences in the process of political representation has been analyzed with regard to issues of caste in India,⁴³ the case of non-heterosexuals is a particularly rich one as it highlights the strong, and sometimes complicating, links between “the academic, the political and the personal.”

To conclude, this issue demonstrates the fecundity of an engagement between theoretical debates and original empirical work. Most importantly, it encourages us to think about political representation in the plural; and to consider representational practices as they unfold within but also outside of the electoral process, in different stages, different sites, and different modes.

Acknowledgments

This Special Issue is based on an international conference on “Political representation in India: Contestations, innovations, transformations,” which took place at EHESS, Paris, in June 2014, in the framework of the study group on political representation of the Association Française de Science Politique (http://www.afsp.info/gp/grepo.html). I want to thank all conference participants for their contribution to this collective reflection.

Notes

^1. Nadia Urbinati, “Representation as Advocacy: A Study of Democratic Deliberation,” Political Theory 28, no. 6 (2000): 760.

^2. Pierre Bourdieu, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 52, no. 1 (1984): 49–55.

^3. Michael Saward, The Representative Claim (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4.

^4. Saward, p. 42.

^5. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).

^6. Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, “The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 11, no. 1 (2008): 403.

^7. Jane Mansbridge, “Clarifying the Concept of Representation,” The American Political Science Review 105, no. 3 (2011): 621.

^8. For an elaboration of the theoretical debates on political representation, see the articles by Niraja Gopal Jayal and Virginie Dutoya in this issue.

^9. Lisa Disch, Rostom Mesli, and Benjamin Boudou, “La représentation politique et les «effets de subjectivation»,” Raisons politiques, no. 56 (December 17, 2014): 29.

^10. Disch, “La représentation politique et les «effets de subjectivation».”

^11. For a thorough discussion of the idea of a constructivist turn in the study of political representation, see Virginie Dutoya and Samuel Hayat, “Prétendre représenter,” Revue française de science politique 66, no. 1 (February 4, 2016): 7–25.

^12. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967).

^13. For an analysis of the different meanings of political representation, building on the work of French and German historians in particular, see Yves Sintomer, “Les sens de la représentation politique: usages et mésusages d’une notion,” Raisons politiques, no. 50 (2013/2): 13–34.

^14. Hasso Hofmann, Gaëtan Pégny, and Yves Sintomer, “Le concept de représentation: un problème allemand?” Raisons politiques, no. 50 (2013/2): 79–96.

^15. Pierre Bourdieu, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 52, no. 1 (1984): 49–55; Pierre Bourdieu, “Le mystère du ministère,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 40, no. 5 (December 1, 2001): 7–11.

^16. Jonathan Spencer, “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3, no. 1 (1997): 8, 12.

^17. Lucia Michelutti, “‘We (Yadavs) Are a Caste of Politicians’: Caste and Modern Politics in a North Indian Town,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 38, no. 1–2 (February 1, 2004): 43–71, 48. Also, Lucia Michelutti, The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India (Delhi, India: Routledge, 2009).

^18. Michelutti, “‘We (Yadavs) Are a Caste of Politicians.’”

^19. Thomas Blom Hansen, “Politics as Permanent Performance: The Production of Political Authority in the Locality,” in The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India, edited by John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt & Vernon Hewitt (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21.

^20. Hansen, p. 22 (emphasis mine).

^21. Yogendra Yadav, “Representation,” The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, ed. Niraja Gopal Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2010): 354.

^22. Anirudh Krishna’s work on mediation practices, which can be considered as an “informal form of representation” (von Lieres & Piper) is a significant exception here. See Anirudh Krishna, “Local Politics,” in The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, ed. Niraja Gopal Jayal and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2010), 299–313; Bettina von Lieres and Laurence Piper, eds., Mediated Citizenship (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

^23. Yadav, “Representation,” p. 354.

^24. Yogendra Yadav, “Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Bahujan Participation in Electoral Politics in the 1990s,” in Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, ed. Francine R. Frankel et al. (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2000), 120–45. This phrase refers to the idea that a first “democratic upsurge” took place in the 1960s, when political competition developed in India as the Congress party started gradually losing its dominant position.

^25. K. K. Kailash, “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same in India: The Bahujan and the Paradox of the ‘Democratic Upsurge’” Asian Survey 52, no. 2 (2012): 321–47.

^26. E. Sridharan, “Class Voting in the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections, The Growing Size and Importance of the Middle Classes,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 39 (2014): 72–76. Interestingly, a recent study found that Delhi’s electoral rolls include 20% of “phantom voters,” which suggests that actual participation is even higher than official figures tell us (Ebony R. Bertorelli, “Delhi’s Phantom Voter,” Seminar, http://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html [accessed February 26, 2016]).

^27. This figure includes six national parties and 49 state parties.

^28. See Srirupa Roy, “Being the Change. The Aam Aadmi Party and the Politics of the Extraordinary in Indian Democracy,” Economic and Political Weekly, 2014: 45–54.

^29. Electoral participation for Delhi state elections reached 67% in 2013 and in 2015, as compared to 57% in 2008 and 47% in 2003.

^30. On the Hazare movement, see R. Harindranath and Sukhmani Khorana, “Civil Society Movements and the ‘Twittering Classes’ in the Postcolony: An Indian Case Study,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 61–71. Also Aradhana Sharma, “Epic Fasts and Shallow Spectacles: The ‘India Against Corruption’ Movement, Its Critics, and the Re-Making of ‘Gandhi,’” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 3, no. 37 (2014): 365–80.

^31. Partha Chatterjee, Against Corruption = Against Politics, 2011, http://kafila.org/2011/08/28/against-corruption-against-politics-partha-chatterjee/ (accessed April 8, 2016); Niraja Gopal Jayal, “Annus Civicus: The Year of the Citizen,” Seminar, no. 629 (2012), http://www.india-seminar.com/semsearch.htm (accessed April 8, 2016).

^32. The demand for a Lokpal dates back to 1966; see Andrew Sanchez, Corruption in India, 2012, https://www.academia.edu/1319330/Corruption_in_India (accessed April 8, 2016).

^33. Srirupa Roy, “Angry Citizens: Civic Anger and the Politics of Curative Democracy in India,” Identities 0, no. 0 (April 2015): 1–16.

^34. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

^35. Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence: The Political Representation of Gender, Ethnicity, and Race (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998).

^36. Pierre Rosanvallon, La Contre-Démocratie. La Politique à L’âge de La Défiance (Paris, France: Seuil, 2006).

^37. On the political representation of Muslims in urban India, see Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot, eds., Muslims in Indian Cities. Trajectories of Marginalisation, (Noida, India: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012).

^38. Peter P. Houtzager and Adrián Gurza Lavalle, “Participatory Governance and the Challenge of Assumed Representation in Brazil” (Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2009). The notion of “self-authorized representation” discussed by Urbinati and Warren is very close to that of “assumed representation” (see Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, “The Concept of Representation,” p. 405).

^39. Rupa Viswanath, “Commissioning Representation: The Misra Report, Deliberation and the Government of the People in Modern India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (July 3, 2015): 495–511.

^40. Saward identifies five roles in any representative claim: the maker of the claim; its subject; its object; its referent and its audience. It is important to note that a single person or organization can play more than one role; for instance, the claim maker can also be the subject of representation—as when a candidate to an election asserts that she is the best possible person to represent her constituency. In this framework, the object of the representative claim is the portrayal of the constituency offered by the subject of representation; it is an idea, as distinct from the referent of the claim, which is “the thing itself”; thus the object is “an interpretation of a referent” (Saward, The Representative Claim, pp. 36, 49). To continue with my example, if the candidate expresses her intention to represent “law abiding citizens,” then the object of her claim is “law abiding citizens,” although the referent is the voters of her constituency as a whole.

^41. LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender.

^42. Disch, “La représentation politique et les «effets de subjectivation».” Pierre Bourdieu, “La délégation et le fétichisme politique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales Vol. 52-53, (1984); Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” in Stuart Hall, ed., Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London, Sage, 1997)

^43. See Viswanath, “Commissioning Representation.”