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The Success of India's Democracy. Edited by ATUL KOHLI. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 298 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $22.00 (paper).
India's democracy challenges theories linking democratic success to middle-class economies, literacy, or ethnic homogeneity. Eschewing these socioeconomic explanations, Atul Kohli focuses this volume on political institutions and processes of power distribution, with essays by an array of renowned international scholars of Indian politics. For those interested in South Asian politics or in democratization, federalism, or cultural pluralism more generally, this collection provides ten incisive chapters on numerous aspects of India's state-society relations and their implications for democracy, including an overview of caste in Indian politics by the late Myron Weiner, to whom the book is dedicated. It is a fitting tribute.
This volume resonates with debates on democratization, and it questions entrenched theoretical mantras. Sumit Sarkar's essay on democracy's indigenous origins challenges the "British made them do it" explanation of India's democracy. He simultaneously undermines the assumptions behind two seemingly antithetical perspectives, liberal and postcolonial theories, for (respectively) crediting and blaming the British for India's contemporary politics. Jyotirindra Dasgupta questions dismissive descriptions of "ethnofederation" by scholars such as Anthony Smith. Rather than an aberrant version of conventional and largely noninteractive models of federalism, India's "process of federalization," he argues, has been remarkably dynamic and thus resilient (pp. 49, 57). Subrata K. Mitra's "Making Local Government Work" contributes to...