subir sinha on the edge of civil society 1 On the edge of civil society in contemporary India. Subir Sinha SOAS, University of London Ss61@soas.ac.uk Forthcoming 2014/15 in Alf Nilsen and Srila Roy eds. Reconceptualising Subaltern Politics in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. [PRELIMINARY DRAFT: PLESE DO NOT CIRCULATE OR QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION. COMMENTS WELCOME] Introduction Partha Chatterjee’s writings on ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society shift focus of the subaltern studies (SS) school from historical subalternity to directly address contemporary politics. 1 Initially, Chatterjee (1997) suggested that differential exposure to ‘the west’ since the late 15 th century caused a split in Indian politics between ‘civil society’ of westernized nationalist and postcolonial elites, and ‘political society’ of the ‘masses’. His (2001) essay draws some ‘essential’ differences between these domains, and implications for politics in postcolonial India: “in the context of the globalisation of capital” we are “witnessing an on-going opposition between modernity and democracy, i.e., between civil society and political society.” (2001: 179) Relying on his peculiar reading of Gramsci and Foucault, Chatterjee (2004) refined his category of political society by arguing that ‘governmentality’ created a ‘politics of the governed’. Next, in his 2008 essay on ‘Democracy and economic transformation in India’ (DET), Chatterjee draws on Sanyal’s (2006) work on primitive accumulation in postcolonial capitalist development, arguing that electoral compulsions force governmental interventions to ameliorate the conditions of the victims of primitive accumulation, in effect ‘reversing’ it. 2 Finally, these explorations were given a skein of unity in an essay in 2011, debating these categories in relation to western political philosophy. These writings have provoked furious debate. Critics, in essence, argue, and I agree, that civil and political society do not have the attributes that Chatterjee ascribes to them, and that subalterns act in ways that differ substantially from his description, taking recourse to, and helping to remake, ‘modernity’ and ‘democracy’. But in this essay I ask: what kinds of classes, and, following from that, what forms of civil and political society does primitive accumulation produce? What does the leadership/hegemony/domination of civil over political society entail? How are the boundaries between these two domains maintained, and what are some features of ‘contacts’ and ‘battles’ between them? In trailing these questions, I draw on the mobilisation of solidarity for Binayak Sen, a medical doctor providing care in a tribal area arrested for being a Maoist and jailed without bail for sedition before being released in 2011, and the politics of Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs) in 1 Other noteworthy attempts are Spivak’s (2000) concept of ‘the new subaltern’ and Chakrabarty’s attempt (2005) to distinguish between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ politics. 2 Sanyal also suggested that international development programs now legitimate capital accumulation on a world scale, a productive line of inquiry that Chatterjee does not yet include in his framework.