A Festschrift Conference
India and the Politics of Developing Countries:
Essays in Honor of Myron Weiner
Four past presidents of the American Political Science Association-Gabriel Almond (Stanford University), Lucian Pye (MIT), Sidney Verba (Harvard University), and Samuel Huntington (Harvard University)-were among the many former students, colleagues, family and friends who met at the Institute September 24-26, 1999, to honor the life and work of the late Myron Weiner.
In his opening address Samuel Huntington remembered "Myron's superb qualities of friendship, teaching, and scholarly work" and complimented conference organizers Ashutosh Varshney (Kellogg/Department of Government and International Studies) and Paul Brass (University of Washington-Seattle) on a most fitting tribute. The Kellogg Institute hosted the Festschrift conference with support from the Ford Foundation.
Huntington's opening lecture recalled Weiner's 1971 piece based on pre-1945 conflict in the Balkans, "The Macedonia Syndrome." The rediscovery by people throughout the world of ethnic, racial, and religious identities makes Weiner's analysis central to a crucial puzzle facing modern political science, according to Huntington. He compared the Kashmir, Kurdish, and Chechen conflicts to the Macedonian model and challenged political scientists, in the spirit of Weiner's work, to look for practical solutions to the institutional challenges states face from communal claims to self-determination.
The first full day of the conference began with the panel chaired by Susan Berger (MIT), "Perspectives on the Field of Comparative Politics and Political Development." Almond opened the session with memories of working with Weiner on a team of six editors of the pioneering book, The Politics of Developing Countries (Princeton University Press, 1960), which represented the first major comparative project on the politics of the countries decolonized after World War II. Almond reviewed the comparative and theoretical roots of political science from Herodotus through Plato and Aristotle into modern times, with special attention to early Indian contributors such as Kautiliya. Fred Dallmayr (Kellogg/Department of Government) engaged the idea of political theory as comparative classification and cautioned western comparativists to recognize their own biases when working on countries like India.
Paul Brass addressed the methodological problems of the developmentalist perspective that has dominated comparative studies of India for the past twenty-five years. He criticized the conservative values associated with modernization theory and called for a critique of democracy and developmentalism that attends to issues such as human rights and self-governance. Sidney Verba described Weiner's work in The Child and the State in India (Princeton and Oxford, 1992) as a brilliant example of how good social science work could address human rights concerns such as child labor in India.
In the second panel Pratap Mehta (Harvard University) served as presenter and discussant for Shmuel Eisenstadt (Hebrew University and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), who was unable to attend. Eisenstadt's paper examined the 'great puzzle' of the modern Indian political system: How was it possible for a "viable constitutional system to develop in a cultural... context so radically different from that of the 'original' democracies"? According to Eisenstadt, India's advances in democracy have been made through power-sharing and accommodation among groups. Mehta encouraged scholars to examine how political state forms have provided incentives for different identities in civil society, thereby mobilizing particular identity groups. He suggested that the accommodative behavior Eisenstadt seeks to explain may be more a product of contemporary state privilege than historical tradition.
Lucian Pye analyzed the disappearance of the one-party state in our decade, using as a starting point Weiner's path-breaking analysis of the relations between the center and the localities in the pro-Indira Gandhi Congress system, which provided political scientists with a basis for distinguishing democratic one-party states from those that were essentially authoritarian in nature. Pye examined the pattern of transition from an authoritarian to a semidemocratic and, eventually, to the pluralistic democratic model and argued that the end of the Cold War, revelations of corruption, the refutation of central planning and social engineering, and the disappointment with technocratically led states all contributed to the worldwide demise of one-party-dominant systems. In his discussion Scott Mainwaring (Kellogg Director/Department of Government) suggested that a more refined distinction between democratic and authoritarian one-party systems, such as Giovanni Sartori's four-type scheme, might better suit Pye's analysis. He questioned whether one modal pattern of the demise of one-party dominant states exists.
Marshall Bouton (Asia Society), chair of the afternoon session, recalled Weiner as a thoughtful analyst of policy and public education in India who was always willing to translate scholarly insight into public discourse. In the first presentation Kanchan Chandra (Harvard University) explored the conditions under which political party elites of one ethnic group are able to incorporate elites from other rising ethnic categories and retain their allegiance. Her model, based in part on Weiner's 1967 study, focused on the ability of the Congress Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to incorporate Scheduled caste ('ex-untouchable') elites across Indian states. She concluded that competitive rules for interparty advancement encourage the incorporation of new elites. Discussant Richard Sisson (Ohio State University) raised questions regarding the definition of 'competitive interparty rules': Is there a competitiveness threshold? What about parties that are competitive nationally but more centralized in their local activities? Discussion followed about whether competition should be conceived as a dichotomous or continuous variable and whether Chandra's model predicted future Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) success in incorporation of elites if the party continues its recent openness to grassroots activism. Others asked if the model could be extended beyond the Scheduled castes to the incorporation of other minorities and women.
In his paper on political 'fixers' in India, James Manor (University of Sussex) discussed the role of modern middlemen who serve as intermediaries between people in the villages and bureaucrats and politicians. He claimed that the scholarly community has underestimated India's potential for political creativity and concluded that India has a unique and much needed resource in the phenomenon of 'fixers' but that their services in most cases are squandered because state leaders do not make adequate use of them.
Francine Frankel (University of Pennsylvania) followed with a presentation on "The Personalization of Power: A Reappraisal of the Indira Gandhi Years." Frankel argued that Mrs. Gandhi did not, as the traditional literature largely assumes, willfully destroy the Congress Party's accommodative legacy, since the politics of accommodation had already collapsed when she assumed power. Personalization of power was the only strategy available to her to prevent opposition groups from seizing power at the center and disrupting national stability.
Mark Robinson (the Ford Foundation) served as discussant for Manor's and Frankel's papers. He described Manor's microlevel analysis as generating interesting hypotheses for future research but cautioned that more empirical depth was required to ascertain exactly what role 'fixers' play in the democratic process. Robinson acknowledged Frankel's claim that Mrs. Gandhi may have had benign intentions as she centralized power under her control but stressed the need to examine her possible alternatives before concluding that personalization of power was her only option.
In the evening Jagdish Bhagwati (Columbia University) presented an economist's perspective on The Child and the State in India which, he claimed, had made it impossible for policymakers and the Indian public to remain ignorant of or apathetic about the problem of illiteracy. According to Bhagwati, all of Weiner's work applied good social science to intensely humane concerns. "Myron," he said, "is best remembered as someone whose heart, mind and spirit soared up while his feet remained firmly on the ground." In the lively discussion of The Child and the State that ensued, the group debated the role of the state in Weiner's argument, particularly the attitudes of elite policymakers towards the educational advancement of the lower strata of society.
The final day of the conference began with a panel, chaired by Michael Teitelbaum (Arthur P. Sloan Foundation), on ethnicity and ethnic conflict. Christophe Jaffrelot (Centre d'Études et de Recherches Internationales) examined why in south India the lower castes achieved political power by the 1960s, while in the north they lagged behind. Jaffrelot noted the different demographic concentrations of upper castes between north (concentrated) and south (dispersed) India and particularly emphasized the availability of an alternative value system for the lower castes of the south, based on the theory that they were the indigenous Dravidian inhabitants. He contrasted this with the fixed Brahminic structures among upper and lower castes in the north. In his discussion Harold Gould (University of Virginia) raised the question whether newly mobilized caste groups could be better conceived as class-status groups rather than social-religious identities. He proposed that the answer to the puzzle of uneven caste mobilization across India might lie in how structures of the modern state differently impacted ritual and material aspects of caste identities.
Steven Wilkinson (Duke University) addressed Lijphart's classification of India as a consociational democracy under Nehru which has become more majoritarian since Nehru's death. Wilkinson argued not only that India has become more consociational of late but also, contrary to Lijphart, that consociationalism is positively correlated with ethnic conflict and the rise in violence since the mid-1960s. He criticized Lijphart's argument for attending too much to the promises of national-level policy rather than examining the reality of exclusion of lower castes and certain linguistic and religious groups at the state level. Andrew Reynolds (Kellogg/ Department of Government) argued that India has been more of an adapted majoritarian than a consensual system in the postindepedence era. He agreed with Wilkinson that basing structures of government on identity groups can lead to extremist outbidding and that consociationalism may run the risk of entrenching ethnic politics.
Robert Bates (Harvard University) discussed "Ethnicity, Capital Formation, and Conflict." Focusing on African cases, he described the ethnic group as a vehicle of accumulation and posited that the political behavior of communal groups can best be understood from a political economy perspective. He concluded that ethnic groups should be conceived of as political and economic resources and contested the traditional assumption that ethnicity is a constant factor in violence. In her comments Catherine Boone (University of Texas-Austin) questioned whether Bates presented a satisfactory link between politics in ethnic form and economic determinants of identity. She argued that the ethnic group we view in the political sphere is not the same as the microlevel kinship ties that manage economies. Several participants noted the conflation of different kinds of groups under the term 'ethnic' and the tendency to confuse caste and ethnicity.
The closing session on political economy was chaired by Amitava Dutt (Kellogg/ Department of Economics). Baldev Raj Nayar (McGill University) examined the growth of the BJP in the 1990s, culminating in its assumption of power at the center in 1998. The BJP's ideology is distinctive in that it rejects the secularism of other parties, is more nationalistic in its rhetoric, and advocates an organicist, well-integrated economy and society drawn on indigenous traditions. But Raj Nayar argued that, rhetoric apart, there is little difference between the BJP's economic policies and those of its predecessors. His explanation for this similarity lies in the centrist tradition of Indian politics and the incentives of the international system. Walter Andersen (US State Department) recalled Weiner's speculation about whether in socially diverse countries like India extreme ethnic parties are pulled toward the center. Andersen predicted that the BJP will not remain centrist-and noted that the center itself has moved to the right.
Mary Katzenstein (Cornell University) likened her endeavor in "The Mother and the State" to Weiner's work on child labor. Katzenstein too examines a morally compelling issue-women's reproductive rights and population growth-and locates part of India's problem with this issue in a realm most political scientists shy away from, namely, culture. She argued that deeply held beliefs about men's and women's places in society have severely retarded population decline in India. On an optimistic note, she pointed to changing assumptions about gender in Indian society and the shift in policy focus from family-planning to reproductive health. Raka Ray (University of California-Berkeley) cautioned that scholars must carefully specify what they mean by 'Indian culture' lest it become too much of a fallback explanation but agreed with Katzenstein that a pragmatic, coalitional politics is the best means for positive change in women's reproductive health policy.
In the final presentation Ashutosh Varshney asked why democracies have not performed as well as some authoritarian regimes in regard to poverty alleviation. He distinguished between direct and indirect poverty alleviation policies and concluded that democracies are more constrained than authoritarian regimes in their ability to undertake indirect methods such as trade liberalizations, exchange rate devaluations, and privatization. He argued further that direct methods available to democracies are made more effective when ethnic and class groups coincide and when the subaltern group is fairly large, because it is easier to mobilize groups on the basis of dignity and justice for a subaltern group than on straight economic issues. Varshney maintained that democracies must also tackle indirect methods of poverty alleviation. Discussant Atul Kohli (Princeton University) argued against treating democracies as one category and questioned the assumption that an ethnically homogeneous poor is more easily mobilized. The session ended with discussion about the utility of distinguishing between direct and indirect means of poverty alleviation and the problem of identifying representative samples of authoritarian and democratic regimes.
Asian Survey, a leading journal of Asian affairs published by the University of California Press, has solicited many of the papers presented at the conference for a proposed special issue in 2000. The organizers are also considering subsequent publication of the papers as a book.
Katharine M. Belmont
