Leslie Johns 00:00

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Burkle book talk. Before we get started, just a few quick announcements. First, audio and video recordings are being made that you can access later as video or podcasts. They'll be available on the Burkle Center website as well as through other formats, including YouTube, and other formats. However, the audience cannot be seen or heard, only me and today's guests will actually be recorded. As you listen to today's talk, please feel free to submit your questions for today's guests using the Q&A button which is at the bottom of your screen. Please be sure to submit brief and clear questions so that I can quickly read them and convey them back to our guests. So today's guest author is Tejas Parasher, who's an assistant professor of political science and Global Studies at UCLA. Previously, he was a Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge in England. He got his PhD from the University of Chicago and 2019. So he's a relatively young scholar. And he's here to talk to us about his first book, which is called Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought. So it's a really exciting new book. And so I'm going to go ahead and ask Tejas to go ahead and join me today. Tejas, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.

Tejas Parasher 01:36

Leslie Johns 51:41

Okay, thank you so much Tejas. Obviously, there's a lot of meat in this book, because I think I think you only really talked about one chapter of the book, right. And so obviously, there's a lot, a lot to talk about in there. And unfortunately, we only have six minutes left of our hour. So it's quite a lot of depth of presentation there. But I think looking at all of the questions that came in, I think I can really sort of condense them into sort of a few thematic topics. So maybe I'll get your sort of quick impressions to them, if you don't mind. I think sort of one theme that came in from a couple of questions that I had myself that I wanted to ask you about, was that, you know, we often think about India as being somewhat special in its path from Empire to nation, I think it's a phrase you you kept using, which is a really beautiful phrase, in that it was a relatively peaceful path, a relatively stable path. You know, it didn't descend into warfare, or autocracy, like so many other nations tragically experienced. And I guess I was wondering if you could give us any insight into how much these thinkers were a part of that specialness? Did they would you say they're part of that causal path? Did they spill over and affect other nations? You know, what is your insight on that specialness of India? Yeah.

Tejas Parasher 53:16

Great. Thank you very much. That's, it's great. So so two aspects of the question, I think I'll take each in turn. So the first point about the success of democracy. So I think one idea that is really important for us to keep in mind when we talk about stability of democracy is this idea of democratic deepening, that to the extent to which an electoral system coincides with people's acceptance of their own power, right? Like, do citizens of democratic states see themselves as empowered citizens who can hold governments accountable? And I think that was a question that this radical democratic tradition, particularly the Gandhian variant of has raised very prominently, right, like that. It's not enough just to have a kind of institutional arrangement of electoral democracy. But what you need also are, is a body of citizens who see themselves as democratically empowered. So one of the reasons I think that democracy has been stable in India is not simply the institutional aspects of it, but the fact that there has been a public culture and I think Gandhianism, the history of Gandhianism has a lot to do with that. And I think the tangible example for of that, that I can just briefly give is that when you have moments of democrat when you've had moments of democratic erosion in India, in the 1970s, for instance, then these kinds of ideas about participatory politics and the importance of having citizen participation in lawmaking have emerged to the fore to languages of protest. Right. Right. So they always, I think, provide a check to the potential erosion of democracy in democratic institutions through the cultivation of a public culture that emphasizes the citizen empowerment. So I think very important, so not simply the stability of democratic institutions, but actually the existence of a vibrant democratic culture, which is something that this tradition raised as its primary concern. And then the second point about what influence are one of the things that I am really interested in actually is the ways that at the margins of a lot of nationalist movements in, in South Asia, certainly, but also in, in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and in the Caribbean, you have a lot of theories about the importance of participatory politics and an apprehension about post colonial state building as not giving sufficient attention to the importance of citizen participation. So you see this in Frantz Fanon, actually in the Wretched of the Earth, where he has this chapter that's really, really apprehensive about nationalist political parties and the way they treat the poor and the way they treat everyday members in saying that this can really morph into a kind of potentially dictatorial form of elite rule. Right? So one of the things I think, in terms of connections of this tradition with other contexts and other iterations is other iterations of anti colonialism is looking at critiques of nationalist leadership, democratic critiques of nationalist leadership that existed in I would say, a number of Imperial contexts and those critiques have kind of been forgotten, because we've been fixated so much on the kinds of states that actually emerge from the ruins of empire and not looking not being sufficiently attentive to critics of those kinds of states.

Leslie Johns 56:37

Okay. Do you do you mind staying with us for a few extra minutes? Okay. And a few people wrote in asking about Modi, you know, because I think sort of the, you know, the conventional criticism of Modi is, is that, you know, he's sort of taking India in a more autocratic tradition by sort of diminishing the powers of the parliament. But might another interpretation of Modi be that he's more directly connecting to the people and diminishing, you know, he, there's something about Modi that makes it sound like he's making more of a connection with the people, perhaps in a more direct form of democracy. And I was, I was wondering how do how do some of these theories connect to more of the populist politicians that we see going on in modern India?

Tejas Parasher 57:37

Great, thank you. So I think what is often called democratic backsliding is more accurately understood in the Indian case, but also in many other cases, I can think of Brazil, for instance, as electoral authoritarianism, more so than sort of a rejection of democracy. It's not so much that it's an it's an reduction of democracy simply to election, right. And the election of charismatic leaders, who can sort of speak on behalf and I'm thinking of Jan-Werner Muller's work on populism, for instance, that kind of the one leader speaking on behalf of this category of the people, and being so election is not the legitimized, election is in fact seen as the grounds of legitimacy of charismatic authority. But other structures of democracy are eroded, right. And so that kind of a minimum, it's a kind of Schumpeterian nightmare, like the worst version of Schumpeter in a sense. And I think this this, the kind of theory of popular politics you have here, it's very different because this tradition, the Gandhian tradition, and the tradition that Roy represented, that I was talking about earlier, is really apprehensive about single figures or members of of political parties, for instance, claiming to speak on behalf of the people. Right. So it's, it's that it's very critical of the act of the monopolization of representation itself, the act of representation, being monopolized either by a political party as a whole, or by an individual, is something that this tradition is not only critical, of, but it's actually seeking to protect against. And that's why Narayan has all these theories about how to make people accountable to lower levels. So it's all meant to kind of protect against the rise of dictatorship or authoritarianism, right.

Leslie Johns 59:21

I see Modi as a modern manifestation of this tragedy.

Tejas Parasher 59:25

Not all, not at all, not at all. No, no, because this is, it's it's meant it's very fearful of people speaking on behalf of popular sovereignty, popular sovereignty as something that can be represented or concentrated within a single person, which is the justification for charismatic leadership. Right. So I think that's important to note because anti parliamentarism need not always go in that kind of authoritarian direction. And that's just I think, something that I think this tradition highlights.

Leslie Johns 59:58

And then one final question then from our fearless leader here at the Burkle center, Alexandra, who you thanked in your introduction, I think she was quite inspired by the theory that you discussed and was sort of very intrigued by the implications of it for US politics, particularly given a lot of the stalemate that we see going on in the US Congress. And was wondering if you had any thoughts about, you know, how the ideas from, you know, Indian political theory might have relevance for thinking about US politics, political reform in the modern context, as either an alternative to the current party system, or perhaps some form of supplement to the way the US political system currently works?

Tejas Parasher 1:00:54

Yeah, great. Thank you. I mean, one of the things that I was most struck by is about this. I mean, the text like Gandhian Constitution is the scale of its ambition. So it just, it doesn't simply say that these are problems that will exist at the end of the British Empire, but that these are problems that beset all countries with electoral democracy. So it says that these are ideas that can potentially exist in some way, some form or another in Western Europe, in the United States. So certainly, I think Narayan himself would be very much a fan of us looking to him for solutions to American political paralysis. That is the kind of ambition he would have wanted. So yes, so I think that certainly the party system and the ways that party systems can lead to political deadlock, but also the ways that both parties is, you know, the whole election of candidates and the caucus system, the ways that sort of election itself is something that parties play an outsized role in is something that we need to think more clear, more critically about, right, like, what role do parties play within theories of democracy. And that's an issue that I think he raises. Now, there is, of course, in the American system, that whole theory that goes back to Tocqueville that the place where you really have robust democracy in the United States is sort of New England town halls, and, you know, local politics. So and I think that's actually something that the Narayan framework also is in conversation is with and also pushes us to take more seriously that, perhaps one, you know, it while thinking about the large scale problems at the federal government level of party politics, the role of lobby groups, and so on, and the intersection of finance and campaign financing in elections and the problems that leads to in terms of democratic legitimacy. While being critical of that, we also need to take local politics much more seriously sort of, you know, in the way that Tocqueville saw as the real strength of the American federal model, that it did allow for a certain kind of participatory politics to exist at local levels. And I think that's something that actually Narayan wanted sort of people in the 1940s to go back to more. So I would say that that that is something that those who are interested in political reform in the United States also need to think more about sort of, how do we, you know, revitalize the democratic potential of local citizens politics.

Leslie Johns 1:03:12

Okay. Thanks so much, I see that we did have a couple of questions come in, in the last couple minutes, from people who really know their Indian political theory, because there are lots of really long Indian names, I will just say, for those of you who are super excited and wrote in really late, I really encourage you to go out and get a copy of the book, where your very detailed questions I'm sure will be answered by the book. Thank you so much for joining us Tejas. It's definitely a really exciting publication. And, you know, thank you so much for contributing to our knowledge of this important topic. And thanks so much to our audience today for joining us and being excited to learn so much more. This is our last Burkle book talk of the calendar year. But we certainly have many exciting events both online and in person that you can learn about from the Burkle website. And we'll also be back in January with an exciting new round of events that we'll be posting soon on our website. Okay, so thank you so much, and Goodbye, everybody.

Tejas Parasher 1:04:26

Thank you Leslie this was a pleasure.

Leslie Johns 1:04:27

Okay, bye Tejas.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai