A Festschrift Conference

India and the Politics of Developing Countries:
Essays in Honor of Myron Weiner

The Kellogg Institute for International Studies
University of Notre Dame

September 24 - 26, 1999

Friday, September 24

Special Evening Presentation (8:00 pm)
Reflections on Myron and Macedonia
Samuel Huntington, Harvard University

Saturday, September 25

I. Perspectives on the Fields of Comparative Politics and Political Development
(8:45 am - 10:15 am)

Comparative Politics and Political Theory
Gabriel Almond, Stanford University
Discussant: Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame

The Political Science of Development
Paul Brass, University of Washington
Discussant: Sidney Verba, Harvard University
Download paper

II. Comparative Reflections on Indian Politics
(10:30 am - 12:00 pm)

The Civilizational Framework of Indian Democracy
Shmuel Eisenstadt, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
Discussant: Pratap Mehta, Harvard University

Why One-Party-Dominant Systems Decline
Lucian Pye, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Discussant: Scott Mainwaring, University of Notre Dame

III. Parties and Politicians (2:00 pm - 4:30 pm)

A Model of Elite Incorporation in Indian Politics
Kanchan Chandra, Harvard University
Discussant: Richard Sisson, Ohio State University
Download paper

Small-time Political 'Fixers' in India's State Politics
James Manor, University of Sussex
Discussant: Mark Robinson, The Ford Foundation
Download "Towel Over Armpit"

The Personalization of Power
Francine Frankel, University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Mark Robinson, The Ford Foundation

Special Evening Presentation (8:00 pm)
Child Labor and Education
Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University

Sunday, September 26

IV. Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflict (9:30 am - 12:00 am)

Caste Politics in North and South India
Christophe Jaffrelot, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques
Discussant: Harold Gould, University of Virginia
Download paper

Ethnicity and Conflict
Robert Bates, Harvard University
Discussant: Catherine Boone, University of Texas-Austin
Download paper

India, Consociational Tehory and Ethnic Violence
Steven Wilkinson, Duke University
Discussant: Andrew Reynolds, University of Notre Dame

V. Political Economy
(1:30 am - 4:00 pm)

Democracy, Dignity and Poverty
Ashutosh Varshney, University of Notre Dame
Discussant: Atul Kohli, Princeton University

The Limits of Economic Nationalism: Economic Policy Reforms Under the BJP-LED Government
Baldev Raj Nayar, McGill University
Discussant: Walter Anderson, US State Department
Download paper

Mothers and the State in India
Mary Katzenstein, Cornell University
Discussant: Raka Ray, University of California-Berkeley

This conference will explore what Myron Weiner has meant to and for us. We will, however, not only praise and honor him but also engage critically with his work and ideas. We want to respect him the way he would have most appreciated - namely, by taking his work, ideas and values seriously as matters for discussion and retrospective assessment, including, as the issues warrant, argument and debate.

The theme we have chosen is "India and the Politics of Developing Countries." The intersection of India and developing countries is in keeping with the spirit of Weiner's lifelong work, which presented India in a comparative perspective, brought perspectives from India to the study of developing countries, and produced through this method many influential ideas in the field of political development. Our writers include some major non-Indianists, in the field of comparative politics, who will tell us what Weiner's research meant for their work, and Indianists who will address how the comparative framing of Weiner's India-related work shaped their understanding of Indian politics.

The listed selection of paper writers and speakers represents three to four different generations of scholars associated with or influenced by Weiner since the 1950s.
Myron Weiner was born in New York in 1931, graduated from the City College, New York, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1951, and received his PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 1955. He began his teaching career at Princeton, then moved to Chicago and, in 1961, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he progressed from Associate Professor of Political Science to Professor, Chairman of the Department, and Ford International Professor of Political Science.

He also directed MIT's Center for International Studies between 1987 and 1992. During his career he held several visiting appointments at Harvard, Oxford, the Hebrew University, Delhi University, and the University of Paris. Before his death, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

He started studying India in 1952, as a student at Princeton. Later on, with his wife Sheila, a scholar of Indian art herself, and their two children, he lived in India for several years and visited the country on shorter research trips almost every year thereafter. The result was a remarkable intimacy with India and Indians, which made his insights authentic and his arguments deep. Over the course of his career he authored a total of thirteen books, edited nineteen others, and wrote innumerable articles on Indian and comparative politics.
Myron Weiner, 1931 - 1999

Weiner wrote an award-winning book (Party Building in a New Nation, Chicago, 1968) on the democratic success of the Congress party. Studying how the Congress party functioned in five districts, he argued that a commitment to internal elections, a capacity to manage social conflicts within the structure of the party, and a pragmatic compromise with the local power structures explained the success of the party. He later wrote on the decline of the Congress as well, identifying the erosion of internal democracy and emergence of reliance on personalities - de-institutionalization, in short - as the salient cause of decline. In the late 1960s and 1970s he challenged 'modernization' theory, which predicted erosion of religious, caste, linguistic, and tribal identities as developing countries 'modernized.' He argued, for example, in Sons of the Soil (Princeton, 1978), that as groups organized for economic gains and political power, modernization could be expected to reactivate and intensify ethnic conflicts.

Weiner anticipated much of the debate that later emerged in India over affirmative action, personal laws, and the Baburi mosque. Along with Rajni Kothari, he also founded the study of Indian elections. His more recent scholarly work was dominated by a subject never touched by political scientists. In The Child and the State in India (Princeton and Oxford, 1992), his best-selling book which combines excellent social science with profound human values, Weiner critiqued the perceived orthodoxy that child labor would automatically disappear and primary education become universal as poor countries became richer. He showed that most societies in the West as well as Eastern Asia abolished child labor before they ended mass poverty. The greatest obstacle in India, Weiner argued, has simply been that most of the children in India's labor force have come from the lower castes, and the upper-caste elite did not consider education necessary for performing the menial tasks of society, assigned to the lower castes by tradition.

It is a tribute to Weiner's stature as a scholar and also to India's vitality as a democracy that a book so critical of India's policymakers and elite was widely read not only by Indian intellectuals, activists, and scholars but also by bureaucrats. Weiner made us look harder at ourselves, and convinced many that we did not have to wait until incomes of poor families rose to end child labor. In the process, he opened a new activist resolve at the grassroots.

If there is some understanding of India in the US today - though clearly a great deal more needs to be done - it is partly because scholars such as Weiner devoted virtually their entire careers to studying and explaining India's politics, political economy, and political culture, with great insight and persistence.

Myron Weiner, doyen in the field of Indian political studies in North America, died at his home in Vermont on the morning of June 3, 1999, at the age of 68. He was buried, according to Jewish tradition, the next morning in the Jewish section of the Montpelier cemetery. He is survived by his wife and two children, Saul and Beth.

- Paul Brass and Ashutosh Varshney