India’s problems of governance may be located in the disjunction between the Indian crowds, mobilized during the national liberation movement, and their post-independence political institutions. Reconstruction of the polity by India’s elites after independence was, arguably, an extension of colonial arrangements of power and authority. Governing strategies that had emerged during India’s national liberation movement, however, were more often than not equipped with visions of an alternative political system as these had evolved as subaltern movements at the level of the everyday material conditions of colonial repression. But emergent subaltern actors were either manipulated or subverted by India’s nationalist elites whose imagination of the Indian state-nation was not comprehensively counter hegemonic. This was because their worldview was largely an extension of the Eurocentric colonial discourse. This work argues that an appropriate level of popular support may be ensured by entrenchment of popular institutions with which their end-users can identify themselves. This is essential for the legitimacy of any political system. Any roadmap for further research in this area may incorporate the neoinstitutional model of analysis employed in this work to explain problems of governance in an era of globalization and the digital divide. This work would be of interest to political scientists, political sociologists and historians.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Prasenjit Maiti
Dr. Prasenjit Maiti (b 1971) is a political sociologist. He joined the development sector after teaching and researching at the Postgraduate and MPhil levels of the University of Burdwan during 1995-2002. He was on secondment at the Institute of Federalism, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (1999). He was the Director of North Africa, Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent on the inaugural Technical Committee of Fed-Net (2004) hosted by the Forum of Federations: An International Network on Federalism (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). Dr Maiti was professionally associated with Action Aid, West Bengal Pollution Control Board, Consumer Unity and Trust Society, The Energy and Resources Institute, Council for Development Studies and Shelter Promotion Council in the recent past. He coordinated publication of the Urban Development Debates series (Volumes I-IV) brought out by Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi (2004-05). Dr. Maiti served as Reviewer (2001) for policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management (College of Education, Division of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati). He is also Referee for Environment and Development Economics (University of York, Heslington, York) published by the Cambridge University Press and Crime Prevention and Community Safety (Perpetuity Press, Leicester) as well as Reviewer for Globalization and Health published from London. His mainden publication on the problems of governance in the Indian context (2002) is based on his doctoral thesis developed from a German Research Council project under the auspices of the Department of Political Science at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. Dr. Maiti was invited to the International Conference on Federalism 2002 organized by the Swiss Government at the University of St Gallen (2002).
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