Preliminary Programme

For the many continuities between the 1935 Government of India Act and the Indian Constitution highlighted by historians, with regard to group rights, 1947 marked an important departure. Religious minorities, the main focus of colonial safeguards, were removed from the purview of legislative and employment quotas, which came to be restricted mainly to Dalits and Adivasis. Existing explanations have focussed on Partition and its consequences for religious minorities, and to an extent, the role of leaders such as Nehru and Ambedkar. However, the eventual shape of constitutional group rights was not predicable in either the lines of Partition or the preferences of powerful actors. Instead, it was arrived at through a process of debate and compromise in which the each of the contending parties had to move from their initial preferred position. In the course of the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly (1946-50), the legitimating vocabulary of the Indian polity was transformed, with the concepts of secularism, democracy, justice, national unity and development becoming the new currency of political debate. The constitutional settlement arrived then continues to endure, even as Congress dominance has declined. To an extent, the shifts in the institutional and normative framework of group rights from consociationalism to affirmative action reflected Congress hegemony; however, the creation of consensus required concessions from the Congress as well. This paper thus offers a new approach to ideational explanation, which goes beyond the conventional focus on key individuals found in the writings of the Subaltern School and their interlocuters. (Show less)

The Subaltern Studies Collective has produced a sophisticated and complex critique of the discursive power of colonialism with its various fields of knowledge. Yet, this power is never absolute and always leaves some, even is highly restricted, room for local agency. Part of this agency is expressed in the transformation of global ideas in light of specific local contexts. In this paper, I explore contemporary manifestations of this kind of agency by investigating different local responses to global liberal ideas about “the rule of law” in Bangladesh. More specifically, I focus one particular project of the European Union, UNDP, and four local NGOs who try to promote “the rule of law” through non-state justice institutions in rural Bangladesh. Based on empirical material from six months field-research in Bangladesh, I argue that (a) the fieldworkers of local NGOs do alter the dynamics of local conflict resolution in non-state justice institutions; and (b) that they do so precisely because they transform (rather than fully reject or uncritically replicate) global liberal ideas about “the rule of law”. Thus, the ways in which the fieldworkers of local NGOs think about “the rule of law” and local justice actively entangle and combine different ideas from different contexts. These entanglements escape analytical frameworks that rely on reified notions of culture and draw all too sharp distinctions between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ ideas. (Show less)

Is the selective distribution of impunity consistent with the meaning of 'democracy'? An influential body of Subaltern Studies scholarship led by Partha Chatterjee argues that politicians who extend the benefits of impunity to the poor—for example, impunity vis-à-vis existing property laws for urban squatters—act within the terms of electoral accountability and, thus, democracy. I argue, instead, that the concept 'democracy' combines electoral accountability with a commitment to the rule of law (ROL). Wide variations in the substantive content of law are possible, but contradictory 'enforcement regimes’ are not. I use this ROL-focused conceptualisation to advance the study of democracy in two notoriously difficult cases: ‘patronage’ democracy in India and ‘Islamic’ democracy in countries like Pakistan. (Show less)

While the publication of Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the
Spectre of Capital represents the latest iteration in a long-running
debate between Marxist and postcolonial theorists, it coincides with
the publication of major materialist critiques in feminist and queer
theory including Nancy Fraser's Fortunes of Feminism (Verso) and James
Penney's After Queer Theory (Pluto). This chapter begins by
considering what is at stake in the overarching debate between Marxism
and postcolonialism. It then explores how this debate has played
itself out in queer theory, where the main conceptual antagonists have
been Foucauldians and materialists (D'Emilio, Hennessy). Postcolonial
theory has intervened in queer scholarship relatively recently (Puar,
Gopinath, Hoad, Spurlin), but it has brought with it a
poststructuralist inheritance principally via the Deleuzian idea of
assemblage. The chapter will consider what has been gained and lost as
a result of this conjunction of theoretical influences. In particular,
it will ask whether assemblage analysis has detracted from, and
undermined, the precise identification and attack of homophobic
agency. In conclusion, the chapter will consider whether the
Marxist-postcolonial debate is premised on false oppositions, and will
ask what a queer postcolonial Marxism might look like.
(Show less)