From: "Sumit Guha" <sguha@HISTORY.RUTGERS.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2011 4:49 PM
Subject: REVIEW: Ganguly on Oldenburg _India and Pakistan and Democracy_
> Philip Oldenburg. India, Pakistan, and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle
> of Divergent Paths. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon Routledge, 2010. x
> + 273 pp. $145.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-78018-6; $39.95 (paper),
> ISBN 978-0-415-78019-3.
>
> Reviewed by Sumit Ganguly (Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian
> Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington.)
>
> Published on H-Asia ( January , 2011)
> Commissioned by Sumit Guha
>
> Common Origins, Divergent Paths
>
> From the perspective of the present it is hard to come to terms with
> the fact that both India and Pakistan emerged as independent states
> from the collapse of the British Indian Empire in 1947. The political
> trajectories of the two states have so significantly diverged that it
> seems inconceivable that they had common roots. Today , despite a
> plethora of domestic problems that are sandbagging its growth, India
> is increasingly a significant global actor. Pakistan, in contrast, is
> caught in a vortex of economic, political, and social problems, which
> have no possible panacea in the foreseeable future.
>
> Some past scholarship seeking to compare the two states has bordered
> on the polemical. For example, Ayesha Jalal's book, _Democracy and
> Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical
> Perspective _(1995), suggested that the differences between India and
> Pakistan were little more than epiphenomenal. Instead, she argued
> that beneath their superficial and apparent differences the two
> states were structurally quite similar. Jalal's claims were, bluntly
> put, extraordinarily flawed. Her analysis overlooked the
> fundamentally different patterns of civil-military relations, the
> political mobilization of India's lower castes and minorities, the
> fitful but eventual success of India's federalism, and the
> independence of its judiciary.
>
> Fortunately, elements of an explanation for the divergence in their
> chosen roads can be gleaned from the work of other scholars. For
> example, the Indian historian, Mushirul Hasan, has provided more
> nuanced accounts of how the trajectories of the two nationalist
> movements had predisposed them toward disparate political outcomes.
> Also, the Indian political scientist, Rajni Kothari, in an early
> work, had correctly shown how the Indian National Congress was, in
> effect, a virtual parliament where contending views could be aired,
> discussed, and debated. This legacy played a vital role in
> socializing India's postindependence political leadership to the
> habits of negotiation and compromise.
>
> Philip Oldenburg's work, _India, Pakistan and Democracy_, is a timely
> and useful corrective to Jalal's breathtakingly lopsided analysis.
> Oldenburg emphasizes the critical choices of key nationalist leaders,
> especially Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in shaping the
> respective political arenas of their two nascent countries. However,
> he does not attribute the vastly divergent pathways of the two states
> to the agency of their respective nationalist leaderships. Instead,
> he alludes to the differences in the two principal nationalist
> movements, the ability (and the lack thereof) of the political class
> to establish firm control over their respective military
> establishments, and their differing approaches to the handling of the
> Indian Civil Service inheritance. He also bluntly deals with the
> rather delicate issue of the religious composition of the two states
> and the fraught relationship between nationalism and religion.
>
> The book is carefully researched, well documented, and clearly
> argued. That said, it has some important limitations. At the outset,
> it needs to be spelled out that it is almost completely derivative.
> Oldenburg makes excellent and deft use of the extant literature, but,
> in the end, the study is not based on new historical scholarship or
> on extensive fieldwork in the two states. This is, at best, a superb
> work of synthesis.
>
> In a related vein, Oldenburg displays a proclivity to rely
> inordinately on long quotations. Many of them are indeed apposite and
> telling. However, the sheer array of quotations from other works,
> both scholarly and popular, detracts from the quality of his
> analysis.
>
> Furthermore, despite its obvious strengths, Oldenburg's work suffers
> from two other limitations. First, the argument that he proffers,
> while complex, is hardly parsimonious. Eventually, the reader looks
> in vain for a straightforward causal explanation that would explain
> the markedly different pathways that the two states have trodden
> since independence. Second, and at a more substantive level,
> Oldenburg, in his quest for nuance, fails to adequately emphasize the
> markedly different internal organization and ideology of the two
> nationalist movements and their critical impact on the evolution of
> the political orders in the respective states. The dominant strand of
> one was inclusive, civic, and democratic. The principal
> characteristics of the other were its lack of internal democracy; its
> construction of a monolithic Muslim identity that sought to efface
> differences of region, class, and sect; and a charismatic leader's
> domination of its course. No discussion of the emergence and
> evolution of the two states can afford to elide over this fundamental
> set of differences. In the wake of independence and partition, the
> Indian National Congress possessed a legitimacy and standing among a
> wide swath of Indian society. The Muslim League, though instrumental
> in creating a new state, simply failed to command such widespread
> popular legitimacy. Not surprisingly, it came to rely on the military
> to maintain public order and thereby opened the door to authoritarian
> temptation.
>
> These shortcomings notwithstanding, this is a topical and worthwhile
> work. Policy analysts, journalists, and students interested in the
> contemporary politics of India and Pakistan will benefit considerably
> from a careful perusal of this book.
>
> Citation: Sumit Ganguly. Review of Oldenburg, Philip, _India,
> Pakistan, and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths_.
> H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. January , 2011.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32219
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
>
>
>
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