Publishing books on governance took on urgency roughly around the eighties of the last century. This was the sequel to the feverish conferences, seminars and workshops held in Morocco, Brazil and Switzerland among other places under the aegis of Unesco by innumerable decision-makers and administrators of the developing world. The impellent inevitably was the almost concurrent realisation of the near absence of endogeneity in administrative behaviour in the participating countries.

The post-colonial world had been compulsively swamped by the cloud of pre-fabricated administrative rules of behaviour, western in nature and component. Unesco allowed the experiences of the developing world to be charted and these gave way to giving voice to governance administration with a large dose of people-involvement. The later story is too well-known to be reiterated, the global financial institutions stepped in to accelerate the efforts of individual governments towards transparency, accountability and greater participation.

Ranabir Samaddar’s two-volume efforts continue the trend but in a voice and comportment, which he has established as his own. His earlier co-edited volumes namely New Subjects and New Governance in India (2012) and Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India (2012) had already entered into the process of deciphering the complex issues relating to governing India.

The characteristics of those two volumes lay, as stated, “in combining analysis of the political and ideological aspects with that of the technological aspects of governance.” Apparently this aspect had eluded earlier works on the subject. Samaddar’s affiliation with the august research institution, the Calcutta Research Group provided the needed platform forvigorous collective research to be accomplished.

The volumes under review also complement each other. Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India, as the title suggests, provides a panoramic view of the structures that ensconced the idea of governing the country; it adopts an analytical perspective whereas Neo-liberal Strategy of Governing India, goes beyond the previous volumes’ scope and strives to dissect the prevailing ideological policies influencing governance.

The first part of Ideas and Frameworks shows the widely differing landscape that housed governance in the country, such as radicalism and violence; to a different style of governance, revealing the power of aesthetics. How religion functions as a tool of governing is explored. The second part of this volume enters into the contentious frames of law and regulations as the framework of governance, where “rule of law in a society of unrest” is deciphered along with the role of riot, police in the city; finally the two constitutional tasks of setting up the state and the government are questioned.

Ideas are not static, they are floating and can be numerous; this may be interpreted as the underlying template that propels the author to eclectically choose a number of them that exercised degrees of influences over our evolving governing structures.

The Hind Swaraj was such an idea propositioned by Gandhi. It was presented as an antidote to the raging war that was the tool of sovereign power and eventually became the epicentre of modernity. As an alterity it was the discovery of the self as the individual truth-seeker — “The unconditional power over life”, that is represented by colonial rule is replaced by power within, “the incessant conditioning of life through the search for truth” ( Ideas:19).

The reader is provided with a panoramic view of the innumerable barriers, stringencies and possibilities for governance as they arose down the decades and the ideas that were experimented with to countenance these challenges and their resolutions.

What comes in as a rude realisation is that war was a constant, all through the initial growing years of the country; it was this morbid truth that was predominant while governing strategies evolved. Yet one reality has to be accepted, it was in the spiritual realm that answers were primarily sought, whether during the days of the Hind Swaraj or even as we realise in the contemporary period, we find that the actor-turned politician from down South, Rajnikanth seeks to base his new political ambitions in the same spiritual kitty.

So a hundred years down the line the Indian psyche remains mired in the belief that if the soul is saved, then governance will automatically follow suit. A useful observation is made by Samaddar; the rules of modern governmentality which have stood the test of time perhaps should be supplanted by the “daily flexibility of dialogic autonomies”. The disillusionment with the uniformity of top-down models, and the mandatory scientific approaches influenced the conferences for autonomy in governance based on the daily experiences of the common people alluded to at the start of the review, so the search continues despite the passage of time.

The important point to prove is that the indomitable spirit of the subject-citizen remains uncowed, and that has been time and again unflinchingly established by our literati, Tagore being the foremost among them. The language used by the latter was generated from the flood of aesthetics surrounding daily life, this allowed the self to choose their position adroitly either to free or bind themselves as befitting their temperament.

The claim is to reach the heights of that legacy. Similarly, Samaddar explores the writings of Mill and Jayaprakash Narayan to see the variants in the democratic ideal, but the paradox is the main contender, the subject-citizen. She has no free-play; she is either “legal-citizen”; “differentiated-citizen”; or a member of the “civic-community” such epithets circumscribe, delimit and thus violate the range even customarily advocated for the citizen. So she remains a problem figure for governance.

In the second part of the volume, the problems of governance are countenanced. Does law deter or facilitate? The Rule of Law was promulgated in 1872 through the Indian Evidence Act. This supposedly seeded the process on a platform of rationality, the question that gains significance then is — is being selective in the legal proceedings, to favour those with power and pelf a part of the rationalising process? No less than the CJI has been alleged with such partisan behaviour.

Having laid the framework of governance in Ideas and Frameworks, Samaddar turns to the ground realities of contemporary times in the second volume, Neo-Liberal strategies of Governing India. As he puts it, “An account of post-colonial political democracy in neo-liberal time.” He authenticates, as has been done by almost all contemporary researchers, that modern-day democracy is deeply embedded in “the politics of power, domination, representation, conflict, resistance and popular claims”.

Those few words perhaps best sum up the contents of the volume. The point to specify is the transformation of government, to government of the self. There are three sections, namely rights and development as the site of governance and this embeds chapters such as governing a recalcitrant minority; Rights, development and governance; it also has chapters on claim-making in an age of bio-politics and governmentalisation of parties.

The second section is based on strategies of ensuring the conditions of accumulation and includes discussion on social governance and peace building; the regime of work and accumulation; Extraction, transit labour and governance: walls, zones and corridors.

Part three looks at governance as the site of neo-liberal transformations, in which he discusses crisis, neo-liberal governance and passive revolution. The transformation of all sections of society into mostly passive collaborators through multiple means such as invoking the PPP model has shaped and moulded the hitherto rebellious masses to accept market and capital as the most desirable form of development. To Samaddar a close -reading of the historical processes encapsulating this gradual transformation of the citizenry yields the images necessary to understand our changing structures.

Writers use templates, models or take the help of paradigms to justify their propositions, Samaddar does exactly that. He deliberately resorts to the language of the post-modernists while alleging or analysing, this quite often produces complex images, which one feels are meant to be perceived, in recognition of the complexity that has bogged the Indian polity and its governing mechanisms overtime.

The road he traverses from Hind Swaraj to contemporary times, taking recourse to Agamben, Foucault among others along the way, apart from quite densely analysing a selection of our own distinguished literati produces a massive tome of analyses that can be broken and digested piecemeal only gradually.

One cannot but marvel at such diligence to comprehend the elusive methodology of governance. That said, he does not attempt to provide the solutions but primarily draws up the images that were compulsively thrown up at significant moments of the nation’s evolution.

The book will help research scholars not only with its wide ranging information on the repeated contestation between the state and its citizens but also the huge welter of primary sources will encourage further research initiative along the same lines.

The reviewer is former professor of political science, University of Calcutta.