Few democratic states offer the opportunity to study the array of political issues that India affords. The vast, multilingual, polyethnic polity, riven with every conceivable political cleavage from social class and ethnic diversity to regional disparities, provides social scientists an extraordinary array of subjects to study. Even the very success of its democracy constitutes a compelling puzzle. It has defied a range of contentions that a certain level of economic development was a prerequisite for democracy to emerge, that it depended on the presence of a bourgeois class, and that it would be consolidated at a particular level of income.

Indeed, some scholars of Indian politics have persuasively argued that India became democratic long before it became prosperous. Even today, after nearly two decades of steady economic growth, its prosperity remains highly uneven. Some states and regions of India have indeed witnessed significant gains while others remain mired in abject poverty. Worse still, India has the dubious distinction of remaining the reservoir of the largest pool of the world's poor.

The country has also witnessed extraordinary waves of political mobilization that have enfranchised significant portions of its citizenry, who, though they had previously possessed the power of the ballot, had failed to grasp its significance. Against this backdrop of dramatic political mobilization, it has also seen both substantial political deinstitutionalization and institutional renewal. The varying quality of the country's institutions is reflected at both national and state levels. Several national institutions, most notably the Parliament, have witnessed a remarkable decline in terms of the norms of civility and the terms of discourse. Even the Supreme Court, which was long seen as a model of probity, has recently faced allegations of political interference and corruption. On the other hand, the National Election Commission, a long somnolent body, was revived in the 1990s under a flamboyant but effective Chief Election Commissioner, T. N. Seshan.

The states in India's federal structure reflect a range of institutional capacities. Some states score well on a number of different dimensions, extending from the maintenance of law and order to the delivery of services. Others, especially several in North India, notably the large and populous states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar, perform poorly on most such indices. The sheer diversity of their records, even when taking into account similar sizes and levels of economic development, often provide analysts with opportunities to carry out a reasonable approximation of natural experiments.

The four books under review provide fascinating insights into a number of the most compelling issues of public policy and political processes in contemporary India. James Manor's book, Politics and State-Society Relations in India, which consists of a collection of his writings spanning several decades, offers a number of compelling analyses of various subjects that have been at the forefront of Indian politics at particular historical junctures and epochs. A selection of these still make for fascinating reading, as they still provide viable accounts of those periods and moments. For example, his article “Anomie in Indian Politics,” which dealt with the decline of the Congress Party in the early 1980s and the concomitant rise of normless behavior on the part of professional politicians, remains relevant today. The tocsin that Manor had sounded was, without a doubt, entirely timely. Such anomic behavior has not wholly been extinguished from Indian politics. However, as Manor concedes in a postscript to the article, such behavior is now less pronounced and a more sophisticated electorate holds politicians far more to account.

Another insightful essay in this collection is “Towel over Armpit: Small-Time ‘Fixers’ in the Politics of India's States.” This contribution focuses on the small-time political entrepreneurs who act as middlemen in helping citizenry obtain governmental services. Though they have no official status, they assist often bewildered supplicants as they negotiate bureaucratic organizations in the quest for governmental services. One of the more intriguing features of this essay is its comparison of the varying roles and efficacy of these “fixers” across a range of states in India.

Perhaps Manor's most enduring contribution in this volume is the essay entitled “How Liberal and Representative Politics Emerged in India.” In this essay, he demonstrates how both structure and contingency interacted to propel India toward the adoption and consolidation of liberal and representative institutions. Some of the structural conditions stemmed from the characteristics of British colonial rule. Manor readily concedes that the repressive power of the colonial state was formidable and could be brought to bear to crush any violent challenge against it. However, he also underscores that the colonial state was prepared to countenance nonviolent movements that sought self-government. This dimension of the colonial state gave Indian nationalists the opportunity to steadily press their demands and eventually overthrow colonial rule. He also emphasizes the role of contingency in highlighting the extraordinary role of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who helped the post-independence polity negotiate a channel through the shoals of linguistic and communal tensions. How India may have fared during these “most dangerous decades”—to borrow the noted journalist Selig Harrison's eponymous phrase—in Nehru's absence remains an intriguing counterfactual question.

Despite myriad challenges and a current political milieu that makes democracy appear beleaguered, it has nevertheless managed to endure. Yet India's democracy is forced to countenance a very uncomfortable fact, as Indrajit Roy reminds readers in his Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India: it is the country with the world's largest population of poor people. Three concerns animate his study of the politics of participation in contemporary India. Specifically, he argues that the country's majoritarian electoral system privileges civil and electoral rights over social and economic rights; that although India's poor have made advances, they have faced constraints in their quest for political participation; and that poverty has become concentrated among members of some historically disadvantaged communities.

To test these propositions, Roy examines the cases of Bihar and West Bengal in some detail. He dwells at some length on the colonial legacies that profoundly shaped the rural landscape in both of these states. These inheritances, he argues, created a set of structural conditions for class relations, land tenure, and poverty in both states. Through the use of both secondary sources and some primary data he demonstrates how both caste and religious affiliation still remain highly salient factors in shaping social class and labor relations in both states, albeit in quite varying manifestations.

Ironically, his detailed and virtually ethnographic knowledge of labor and land tenure in particular districts results in such a welter of convoluted discussions that the central argument that he seeks to highlight becomes obscured. As a consequence, the key leitmotifs of his arguments are lost in these overly exhaustive accounts of the particulars of specific regions.

In other sections of the book, Roy critiques the welfare policies of various governments. He is especially disparaging of the Indian state's willingness to limit its Public Distribution System (PDS) to individuals below the poverty line instead of ensuring universal access. He attributes this policy change to the apparent recommendations of the World Bank. However, the evidence that he proffers for the reasons for this policy shift appear to be mostly inferential. No careful attempt is made to trace this policy reorientation. He also expresses significant reservations about the United Progressive Alliance regime's decision to implement the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Briefly stated, the act guarantees 100 days of work to any individual seeking employment. Roy finds that this program is both palliative and has various “neo-liberal” (a term he deploys pejoratively) features embedded in it. His principal objection, it seems, is that the program as designed turns its participants into wage-seekers rather than being “productive social beings” (p. 252). He also cites somewhat dated work from the noted economist Amartya Sen about the inadvisability of cash transfers to the poor because of potential inflationary risks. Instead he suggests that direct subsidies of grain might prove more beneficial. This argument, while seemingly plausible, suffers from at least two major flaws. First, direct food aid instead of cash denies the poor choice. Second, there is evidence that the PDS that Roy so lauds actually resulted in massive leakage of resources.

Roy then proceeds to show, based on a set of interviews with participants in the program in various districts, how they perceived its workings. The responses that he gleans seem rather idiosyncratic and do not meet the standards of scientific polling. Consequently, while the information obtained from them may satisfy an ethnographer, it does not meet the most basic standards of positivist social science.

One key theme that emerges from Roy's occasionally convoluted analysis is that the persistence of endemic poverty has been deleterious to India's democracy. Beyond the costs that poverty has exacted, India's democracy suffers from another critical malaise: the pervasiveness of corruption in public life. Indeed, according to the widely regarded Transparency International survey of sixteen countries in the Asia-Pacific in 2017, India emerged as the most corrupt. Despite this pervasiveness of corruption, its electorate continues to elect a range of individuals with criminal backgrounds. It is this puzzle that Milan Vaishnav attempts to explain in his book, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.

At the outset, Vaishnav contends that the entry of criminals into the political realm, while far more prominent in recent years, is nevertheless not an entirely novel phenomenon in Indian politics. He argues that the first signs thereof had emerged as early as the inaugural election of 1952, when allegations arose about the reliance of politicians on “muscle power.” He then proceeds to show, drawing on Manor's early work, how after Nehru's demise (and that of his immediate successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri), the Congress Party's organizational apparatus went into steady decline against a backdrop of heightened political mobilization. It was during this time, particularly under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, that the party started to increasingly rely on political fixers who had few compunctions about using force to shape electoral outcomes. Matters, of course, worsened as her son and trusted associate, Sanjay Gandhi, brought a range of thuggish individuals into the fold of the party for the same purpose. Other political parties, not surprisingly, also came to emulate the behavior of Congress.

Following this historical discussion, Vaishnav turns his attention to his central question: why do Indian voters routinely support candidates who they know have criminal records? To explain this phenomenon, he debunks some popular theories and then proffers a multilevel explanation. He contends that a prevalent explanation, the ignorant voter hypothesis, seems to provide a compelling answer to this apparent conundrum. After all, substantial numbers of Indian voters are illiterate and many of them lack adequate exposure to mass media. Despite the seeming attractiveness of this proposition, he shows that it has limited explanatory value. At least three factors, he contends, challenge the validity of this hypothesis. First, the vast majority of individuals with criminal backgrounds running for public office make little or no effort to conceal their dubious reputations. In fact, as several of his telling anecdotes demonstrate, they actually flaunt them. Second, despite illiteracy and limited access to news, voters obtain information through community ties. Third, the only study that has thoroughly examined the role of information concluded that those given access to the criminal backgrounds of candidates did not suitably modify their voting behavior.

If voter ignorance does not constitute a compelling explanation, what then might provide a better answer to this puzzle? Vaishnav argues that one of the key factors is the salience of ethnicity in polyethnic states. Though not always politically significant, it can be activated and exploited under particular social and demographic conditions. Ethnic preferences, in turn, can play a critical role in the politics of patronage, especially in a context where the rule of law is weak. Under these circumstances, a reputation for criminality can actually prove beneficial for a candidate, as the individual can then signal a capacity to deliver on commitments to guarantee the interests of particular ethnic communities. Furthermore, Vaishnav argues that if a criminal background enhances an individual's credibility, he or she will have every incentive to proclaim his or her questionable reputation. To affirm this hypothesis, he provides a granular account of a case from the troubled state of Bihar.

A substantial portion of the remainder of Vaishnav's book is devoted to a discussion of possible remedies to corruption and criminality in Indian politics. The complexity of the arguments and evidence are such that they can only be summarized here. Vaishnav, to his credit, draws on an impressive array of sources from India and elsewhere to suggest possible reforms that could reduce the role of criminals in the Indian political process. One key element of any such reforms, he contends, involves the improvement of the delivery of government services, ranging from health care to education to policing. In all these areas, he demonstrates that the Indian state lacks both competent and adequate personnel. Advocates for limited government, who are now at their apogee in the United States, and to some degree in the United Kingdom, will not find these proposals appealing. Their ideological objections aside, there is little question that the Indian state desperately needs to bolster its governance capabilities.Footnote ¹ More to the point, since India has a significant youth bulge and a host of government positions are unfilled, it makes eminent sense to make every effort to recruit competent individuals who can staff these extant but vacant positions.

Beyond enhancing state capacity, Vaishnav also proffers practical suggestions for amending campaign finance laws, ranging from candidate assets to party finances. He also suggests a strategy for erecting more substantial barriers to the entry of criminals into the political arena, namely, legal restrictions on candidates with criminal records from participating in elections or preventing winners with criminal backgrounds from assuming office after elections. Many of these proposals are both thoughtful and commonsensical. Unfortunately, they also defy the processes of path-dependence. As most political parties depend so much on dubious campaign contributions, muscle power, and questionable spending, they have few, if any, incentives to pursue these critical reforms. In the absence of widespread and sustained pressure from India's civil society and possibly its emerging middle class, it is hard to visualize how this much-needed accountability can be realized.Footnote ²

For all the many shortcomings of India's democracy, one of its most exemplary features has been its commitment to a free press. Barring its mostly ignominious role during Indira Gandhi's “state of emergency,” the Indian press has rarely shied away from taking on governments and other powerful actors in the political arena. In the past few years, however, reports have emerged in the nascent (and quite feisty) digital media that a number of major and established Indian newspapers have been willing to publish articles to appease specific political constituencies. More to the point, credible allegations have emerged that a handful of editors of key publications have been removed from their positions as a consequence of political pressure from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. All of these developments are deeply disturbing and raise serious questions about the future of the free press in the country.

Much of critical attention to these infelicitous events has been focused on the state of the elite English-language press. Scant discussion, however, has been devoted to the condition of the vernacular press and especially the Hindi-language press. Such inattention may not be entirely surprising. The English-language press, for compelling historical reasons, has long enjoyed a privileged status in the Indian political arena. Yet ignoring the role and significance of the Hindi press in the country is not only consequential but potentially quite problematic, as it ignores a significant readership that now plays a growing political role.

Accordingly, Taberez Ahmed Neyazi's book, Political Communication and Mobilisation: The Hindi Media in India, addresses an important lacuna in the scholarship on the subject. Neyazi has a supple grasp of his subject. He demonstrates an extraordinary familiarity with the historical origins of the Hindi press and shows how it played an important but somewhat unheralded role during the independence movement. A number of key nationalist leaders, ranging from Bal Gangadhar Tilak to Mohandas Gandhi, supported the development of the Hindi media. Indeed, British colonial authorities were sufficiently piqued with Tilak's involvement with the Hindi press to pass legislation designed to muzzle the press in the form of the Newspapers (Incitement to Offenses) Act in 1908. Gandhi also helped to promote the Hindi press through his criticism of the reliance of his colleagues in the Indian National Congress on English as a lingua franca in political communication.

Ironically, with the coming of independence, the Hindi press lost ground. Neyazi correctly attributes this to the relative standing of the two languages in the national public arena. In part, it also stemmed from the inability of the press to establish a presence beyond northern India, where the language is widely spoken. Later, however, as various social movements gained ground in the 1970s, the Hindi press became an important source of political mobilization.

It is interesting to note, however, that the Hindi press rather abjectly failed to uphold norms and standards of fair, unsparing, and candid reportage during the crisis that led up to the destruction of the Babri Masjid in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh in December 1992. On this occasion, their role revealed considerable partisan bias and, worse still, their inflammatory reporting probably contributed to the violence that engulfed significant parts of northern India in the wake of the destruction of the mosque. On this occasion, a fair-minded “marketplace of ideas,” even in a consolidated democracy, simply did not prevail, and the consequences were dire.Footnote ³

Neyazi devotes the latter part of the book to an informed discussion of the rise of electronic and digital media platforms and their involvement with the anti-corruption movement that Anna Hazare, a social activist, launched in the second decade of the twenty-first century. To that end, he carefully documents the significance of social media as well as the expansion of cellular technology in boosting the movement. He concludes his analysis of the state of the Hindi media with both hopeful and cautionary notes. He is somewhat sanguine about the benefits that the growth of digital media outlets can contribute to a broadening of democratic forces at both regional and local levels. However, he also warns of the potential dangers that lie in the propensity of the current regime to exploit social media to tout its achievements.

These four books are of varying quality. Some among Manor's diverse collection of articles clearly have demonstrated their enduring value. Others, however, have a distinctly dated quality to them and are now mostly of historical interest at best. Roy's work, despite its attention to a vast swath of theoretical and empirical literature and its being based upon substantial fieldwork, nevertheless has a distinct ideological bias and also fails to carefully knit the arguments and evidence into a wholly coherent account. Vaishnav's highly rationalist analysis is carefully constructed, draws upon a wide range of pertinent literature, and provides a mostly compelling argument with appropriate evidence. Neyazi's book not only demonstrates a supple grasp of the material, but also delivers a cogent study of a largely neglected subject.

Though they emphasize quite diverse facets of India's democracy, all help to collectively highlight important strengths and shortcomings of its political order. More to the point, they collectively represent a new wave of theoretically informed and empirically sound scholarship on the country, which can be squarely placed in the broader stream of literature on comparative politics. After a period of considerable neglect of the study of India within the subfield of comparative politics, it appears that this anomaly is now about to be corrected.