Power and Contestation:
India since 1989
by Nivedita Menon & Aditya Nigam
Orient Longman, 2008
In part inspired by how the rest of the world, the West in particular, has perceived Indian politics – or, more specifically, has failed to understand Indian politics – this new work undertakes to detail the country's political history over the last two decades, focusing on the myriad political formations that have shaped the dense political landscape. In explanation of this project, the authors refer to a postcolonial political theorist when they write: "It is revealing of what Mahmood Mamdani has identified as a 'denial of a history and a politics' – what we might term the denial of an 'inside' – to the non-West. There it is, mysterious and inscrutable; its intriguing surfaces always only available to be gazed upon from the outside."
To credit Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam – both political theorists based in Delhi – most people in, for instance, the US are relatively oblivious to the fact that India has a rich and complex political history. But in fact, this idea of India's apolitical inscrutability goes well beyond white Americans. During the early to mid-1990s, the ushering of Hindu rightwing parties into the Indian Parliament saw a concurrent organising of Hindutva cultural events in the US by the Indian diaspora, which in turn proliferated the image of an India that was unadulterated by politics, functioning instead off the projections of Hindutva. Even more recently, the push by Hindutva supporters in California to rewrite sections on Indian history in school textbooks showed a similar trend.
Amidst the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka, some political theorists have attempted to outline plans to solve the ethnic conflict by restructuring the government apparatus around a federal political system that is similar to India's; or, more provocatively, through politico-economic integration with India. Though worth some serious analysis, these arguments often fall into a blind celebration of Indian democracy – failing to understand the conflicts and political contestations that are so much a part of India's contemporary and post-Independence history. Such apolitical ideas of India do not address the struggles of many communities or the violations of rights, such as in Jammu & Kashmir and the Indian Northeast. Menon and Nigam successfully capture this unique political history. They also challenge the Indian left to take this history into account and reconsider its strategies, in order to struggle for those oppressed within the structures of Indian state and society.