Book review: Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar. Maya, Modi, Azad: Dalit Politics in the Times of Hindutva
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23210230241235993 |
| Author | A. K. Verma |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews 145
general strikes in Britain and India and the author here problematizes the historical common sense
reflected in the works of Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, David Hardiman and R. R. Diwakar that the
politics of civil society to check state power was a feature of European industrial societies. She enriches
the understanding of civil society and its relationship with democracy by analysing general strikes in
India, from the seventeenth century to the present, and argues that they were non-violent, peaceful and
covered vast geographical areas in terms of claim-making directed towards the state.
In Chapters 5 and 6, she examines the politics of claim-making in the infrastructural public space of
‘road and railway networks’, redrawing the boundaries of the political that was earlier constituted
through ‘print and visual cultures of representation’. These chapters show that the exercise of discretionary
powers by railway officials in the colonial and post-colonial eras determined forms of collective
assemblies as ‘criminal’ or ‘political’, by responding to them depending on ‘who is engaging in a
particular action’. The longer genealogies of the practice of alarm-chain pulling and pilgrimage to sites
of power, discussed in Chapters 5 and 7, show that their origins lie in the political strategies of the
educated elite, thus debunking the idea that modes of political communication are dependent on the
particularities of pre-existing social identities.
This book achieves a remarkable feat in developing a historically nuanced understanding of the
democratic politics of historically marginalized citizens who adopt practices such as sit-ins and hunger
strikes; petitioning the authorities; general strikes, rail and road blockades; ticketless travels in trains to the
sites of power; alarm-chain pulling and people’s roar assemblies, through multi-sited ethnography of these
practices. Mitchell has ingeniously interpreted these practices, to build a robust understanding of actually
existing and functional democracies, and in doing so she creatively engages with the dominant global
scholarship on theories of democracy in philosophy, literature and social sciences. However, the book
would have added to its richness if it had delved a little more on the existing threats to Indian democracy
that it faces from the resurgent right-wing populism, but the book successfully narrates the story of
enchantment and longing for the democratic state in the lives of historically marginalized citizens in India.
Kunal Kishore
Institute of Law, Nirma University,
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
E-mail: kunalkishore.du@gmail.com
Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar. Maya, Modi, Azad: Dalit Politics in the Times of Hindutva. Noida,
Uttar Pradesh: Harper Collins, 2023, 305 pp., `599.
DOI: 10.1177/23210230241235993
The book under review is a commentary on the culmination of Dalit assertion in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in
2007, and its subsequent decline after the 2012 Assembly election. The Dalit-centric Bahujan Samaj
Party (BSP) got an absolute majority in the 2007 Assembly polls and its leader Mayawati became the
Chief Minister of UP. But the BSP lost in 2012 assembly elections, and its subsequent regular electoral
defeats in Assembly and Parliamentary elections in UP signalled its decline, with the result that its core
constituency—Dalits—began shifting to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which deployed inclusive
strategies to assimilate them. Today, the majority of Dalits have deserted the BSP and joined the BJP for
empowerment and fulfilment of their aspirations. The authors, empathising with Dalit identity and
assertion, see some ray of hope in emerging small Dalit parties competing to retrieve the Dalit constituency
lost to the BJP.
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