Modernity and Democracy in India: Questioning the Teleologies
Anil Kumar Vaddiraju
Abstract
This paper focuses on a two-pronged argument: 1) that both popular and populist democracy and 2) political economy in India work against, or increasingly against, the realisation of modernity. Therefore, what we have is an imperfect realisation of both modernity as well as democracy. The paper stresses equally on political factors such as religious nationalism, failure of secularism and secularisation, and the trends of populist mobilisation in terms of caste and religion, as it does the economic factors. This work, though, concentrates on modernity and democracy in India, and does not fall within the modernisation framework. Nor does it see that modernity is an inevitable destiny. I argue that Indian socio-political and cultural modernity is premised on the Indian economy and the development of productive forces. Hence, it is reasoned that the key to Indian modernity is in the Indian political economy. As long as the productive forces and social relations in the Indian political economy continue to be backward, there is no necessary inevitability that we will progress towards a modern democracy. However, the paper is retrospective in argument, rather than prospective or futuristic.