In a pre-book release interview with The Financial Express (February 17), Christophe Jaffrelot made the interesting observation that different political systems in India and China might not yield much practical difference. The Chinese middle class seems to be coming to terms with a one-party autocracy and the Indian middle class doesn’t vote, Jaffrelot said. “What may be at stake (in India) is the resilience of parliamentary democracy.”

Jaffrelot explains his thesis in the first chapter of this compilation. He concludes that India’s middle and upper middle classes don’t so much want to secede from India — a favourite theme of the leftwing radical chic — but that they are fed up with the “plebeianisation” of politics and are looking for ways to “continue to rule the country”.

This is, of course, a straight counter to mainstream Indian chatterati’s favourite political story, made all the more interesting because it comes from an astute and learned India observer. It is also, sadly for this book, its only first-rate intellectual argument. Most of the rest are sociological examinations of the kind that make up the numbers on the social sciences seminar/conference circuit: perfectly respectable but not terribly sharp. No surprise there perhaps; the book is a compilation of papers presented at a New Delhi seminar.

One near-exception is Shoma Munshi’s thesis on why the celebration of consumerism by private television channels in India is a tool for empowerment. Munshi argues that Indian lower middle class women find small but significant means to challenge the status quo when they make television-driven lifestyle choices. Bombarded as we are with indignant arguments about consumerism’s soul-destroying regressiveness, it is refreshing to find an academic thesis that eschews (middle-class intelligentsia) snobbery and looks at how “ordinary” people find hope. Hope sometimes, as Munshi demonstrates, can be found in New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar shoe shops.

Lajpat Nagar, where incomes and aspirations are outpacing civic amenities and where real-estate values are signalling its possible upgrade to a higher class of lebensraum, may already have many Indians who don’t vote. But do they and the millions in other Indian cities represent a fundamental, systemic challenge to India’s parliamentary democracy, as Jaffrelot argues? One can argue that if politics is shaped by the votes of the “plebeians” and policy still has inputs drawn from the middle-class weltanschauung, then imperfect as it is, the system serves a country where a lot of people are getting wealthier but which also has a lot of poor citizens. Indeed, India’s democracy may be the reason why the economic paradigm shift since the early 1990s hasn’t engendered acute class tension. And the real scandal in Indian democracy is not so much that the rich don’t vote but that the governments poor voters elect let them down so badly, by consistently designing bad welfare policies. If there’s any concern about India’s political system that has been remarkably resilient so far, it arises from government delivery failure. But at least one bunch of non-performers can be thrown out every five years.

They can’t do that in China, where by all accounts social tension is on the rise. Can China’s GDP shape its politics to such an extent that even a rudimentary form of democracy becomes an academic point, especially since the share of mass consumption in China’s GDP is remarkably low, compared with both India’s and the West’s?

This is probably a more critical question for the near future than the one Jaffrelot poses for India. In fact, a surprising omission from a seminar on patterns of Indian and Chinese consumption, at least in the humble view of this reader, is a paper comparing Indian and Chinese consumption trends. Is there a likely political crisis in China’s communists tamping down on mass consumption? That’s something Jaffrelot’s first-rate research can perhaps address.

March Past
The story of the Archaeological Survey of India’s early years is only beginning to be told in all its human and intellectual drama. This lavish coffee-table book (A Vision of Splendour by Gerda Theuns-de Boer, Mapin) picks up the task through the career of Jean Philippe Vogel, a Dutch scholar who joined the ASI in 1901 as the superintendent for the Punjab, Baluchistan and Ajmer Circle. The book tracks his travels around the country for a decade, and especially riveting are the accounts of his excavations, most notably of the Buddhist Gandhara sites.
But what makes the book come alive are over a hundred old photographs of the ASI (above, Jama Masjid, Agra) from the Kern Institute in Leiden in the Netherlands. As the author ties up Vogel’s work with that of men like John Marshall, it emphasises the often little acknowledged contribution of Indians of the early ASI. A lovely book that explains a little more of how India found itself.