La démocratie locale dans les métropoles indiennes

Le bilan de la politique indienne de décentralisation, après douze ans de mise en oeuvre, est très mitigé. Le renouvellement démocratique qu’elle promettait se limite largement au renouvellement du personnel politique local, grâce aux quotas électoraux (pour les femmes, et pour les castes et les tribus répertoriées). Pourtant, dans de nombreuses métropoles, on observe une implication croissante des habitants dans la gestion des affaires locales, principalement à travers des associations de résidents qui se réclament de la démocratie participative et se présentent comme les porte-parole de citadins citoyens. Cet article identifie quatre facteurs explicatifs de la légitimité nouvelle de ces associations comme acteurs de la gouvernance urbaine, et conclut par une réflexion sur les rapports (de classe) entre les dimensions participative et représentative de la démocratie locale en Inde.The Indian decentralization policy launched in the mid-nineties has borne mitigated results. The democratic renewal that it heralded seems largely limited to the renewal of local political personnel through electoral quotas (for women, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes). Yet in many Indian megacities today, one can observe an increasing involvement of residents in the management of local affairs, mainly through neighbourhood associations that invoke participative democracy and claim to be the spokespeople of urban citizenship. This paper identifies four factors that explain the new legitimacy of these associations as players in urban governance; and it concludes with consideration of the relationship, informed by class categories, between the participative and representative aspects of local democracy in India

Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History

Citizenship is a notoriously ambiguous and contested concept. Its ambiguity stems from the fact that it refers at the same time to a normative and a positive reality; to the ideal and the actual; to the moral and the legal. In her latest book, Niraja Gopal Jayal endeavors to ‘document the Indian idea of the citizen across the twentieth century, primarily as a relation between the individual and the state, but also as a relation between citizens’ (p. 2). She disentangles the many meanings—with..

Studying Elections in India: Scientific and Political Debates

Election studies (which are here defined as scholarly work focusing on the major phases of the electoral process, i.e. the campaign, the vote, the announcement of results and subsequent government formation) constitute a distinct sub-genre of studies on democracy, which focuses, so to speak, on the ‘mechanics’ more than on the ‘substance’ of representative democracy. This sub-genre, being relatively more visible than other studies of representative democracy, has specific implications, in the academic but also in the political arena, which are the focus of this critical review of the literature on Indian elections since the 1980s. The paper argues that election studies are really in between science and politics, and that it is important, therefore, to contextualize them

Political Representation in the Discourse and Practices of the “Party of the Common Man” in India

One of the many challenges presented by populism concerns its relationship with political representation. What happens when an anti-politics movement wins elections? This article offers an analysis of the exercise of power by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP, Party of the Common Man), which has been ruling the city-state of Delhi since 2015, in order to bring elements of answer to this question. On the basis of discourse analysis as well as direct observation of meetings, the article first identifies a series of populist tropes in the official discourse of the AAP, including a de-emphasis on representation to the advantage of participation. It then describes the two main participatory schemes implemented by the AAP government since 2015, and shows that these generate, in different ways, a magnification of the mediation work that is central to political representation at the local level in the Indian context. Finally, the article argues that the party has been developing, through these participatory schemes, a form of “inclusive representation” (Hayat, 2013), in which inclusion is linked to mobilization

“What is new is the comprehensive nature of the political assault on academic institutions”—An Interview with Niraja Gopal Jayal

Niraja Gopal Jayal is a professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research, at the crossroads between political theory and the study of Indian politics, focuses on four main areas: democracy, representation, citizenship and governance (including local governance, and gender and governance). She is presently working on the crisis of the public university in India. Interview STLR: Niraja, you have previously written on ..

The Redistribution of Representation through Participation: Participatory Budgeting in Chengdu and Delhi

A strong contention of the “representative turn” is that representation is consubstantial with politics (Saward, 2010). One way to test the heuristic value of this vision is to look for representation in an institution that was historically built against representation, namely participatory budgeting (PB), a democratic innovation that has spread globally with exceptional rapidity. The literature on PB identifies two types of relationships between participation and representation: (i) participation “challenges” (Houtzager & Gurza Lavalle, 2009) existing forms and principles of representation (through “assumed representation” by civil society activists; or through “citizen agents”; Montambeault, 2016); or (ii) participation is “instrumentalised” (Fischer, 2012) by classic forms and actors of representation. On the basis of a comparative analysis of PB experiences in Chengdu (China) and Delhi (India), we argue in this article that a third type of relationship can be observed: participation—as implemented through PB—can also redistribute representation insofar as new, official representative roles are created. Moreover, looking at these new roles provides important clues about the principles of representation that are implemented and therefore about the transformative nature of PB

Introduction. Contextualizing and Interpreting the 15th Lok Sabha Elections

Most of the papers presented in this special issue of SAMAJ are the outcome of a workshop organised by the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi in July 2009. By then the results of the 2009 general elections had been largely commented upon already. The workshop was therefore not meant to discuss electoral results per se, but rather to have specialists discuss papers that considered elections as an analyzer of political dynamics that most authors usually studied in more ordinary times. As ..

Introduction. Urban Democracy: A South Asian Perspective

The ‘urban question’ has attracted increasing attention since the 1990s in the South Asian context because the issues at stake take on a particular urgency in the subcontinent for several reasons. A first, obvious reason is the increasing (and even strategic) importance of cities from a demographic, political and economic perspective. South Asia is home to 5 of the 10 largest cities—in fact, megacities—in the world. At the same time, with an urban population of 485 million, South Asia remains..

CEIAS – Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud

Blandine Ripert, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, Aurélie Varrel, chargées de recherche au CNRS Dynamiques contemporaines en Asie du Sud Destiné avant tout aux étudiants de master, ce séminaire a pour objectif d’apporter des éléments de compréhension de l’Asie du Sud contemporaine, dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire. Nous avons examiné un certain nombre de phénomènes sociaux et politiques contemporains, à différentes échelles. Ce séminaire s’est appuyé sur des exemples tirés des recherches en ..

CEIAS – Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud

Blandine Ripert, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, Aurélie Varrel, chargées de recherche au CNRS Dynamiques contemporaines en Asie du Sud Destiné avant tout aux étudiants de master, ce séminaire a pour objectif d’apporter des éléments de compréhension de l’Asie du Sud contemporaine, dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire. Nous avons examiné un certain nombre de phénomènes sociaux et politiques contemporains, à différentes échelles. Ce séminaire s’est appuyé sur des exemples tirés des recherches en ..