Underestimating Rajni Kothari

DOI10.1177/2321023013482783
Date01 June 2013
AuthorJames Manor
Published date01 June 2013
Subject MatterSymposium
Military-Madrasa-Mullah Complex 7
India Quarterly, 66, 2 (2010): 133–149
A Global Threat 7
Symposium
Underestimating Rajni Kothari
James Manor
After forty years of pouring over Rajni Kothari’s writings in search of blinding insights that always
emerge, I never imagined that I could underestimate his work. But I was mistaken. For this symposium
I re-read his 1970 book, Politics in India and drafted a commentary on it. But when I turned to his
Memoirs (which appeared 32 years later) for a few additional ideas, I discovered that while my initial
draft was largely accurate, it was also inadequate—far too limited and one-dimensional. It focused on
only one level: on events in India’s political system. The Memoirs reminded me that Kothari operates at
multiple levels. A second look at Politics in India revealed that he had done so even in that early work.
A hasty reading of that book might lead us to conclude that in writing it, Kothari was guilty of the
same error that I committed in my first draft: an inordinate preoccupation with political parties, institu-
tions and leaders’ actions. We might conclude that his horizon broadened only in his later writings. But
if we read it more closely, with his later writings and his Memoirs in mind, we see that even in Politics
in India (1970), his first book—which was written before the political system slipped into crisis—the
themes and concerns that emerged in his later analyses are present in depth. They are not stressed because
the crisis was still brewing when the book was written, but they are there. To overlook them is to
underestimate Kothari.
The best way to illustrate this is to summarize my accurate but inadequate first reading of his book,
and then to explain how a more careful examination, in the light of his later work, reveals subtleties and
depths in Politics in India which were missed the first time round.
An Inadequate Assessment
Politics in India is a crucially important guide to the first of three phases in India’s post-independence
history—the period in which democratic institutions and a somewhat limited culture of political acco-
mmodation were constructed and took root, a process that was both enabled and constrained by the
Congress Party’s dominance. But it also helps mightily to frame analyses of the second phase—in which
Indira Gandhi radically centralized power and undermined both the formal institutions of state and
(astonishingly) her own party’s organization in pursuit of personal (and latterly, dynastic) rule.1 It even
offers a useful guide to the study of the third phase, since 1989 when it became impossible for any single
party to win a majority in the Lok Sabha—during which power has flowed massively away from the
Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), to other institutions at the national level, to the federal system and to
governments and forces at the state level.
James Manor is the Emeka Anyaoku Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth Politics in the School of Advanced
Study. E-mail: James.Manor@sas.ac.uk.
Studies in Indian Politics
1(1) 7–11
© 2013 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi, Singapore,
Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/2321023013482783
http://inp.sagepub.com

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