INTRODUCTION

Stig Toft Madsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Uwe Skoda

The European form of liberal democracy is derived from a singular set of historical and political developments particular to Western Europe, and constitutes only one among a range of alternative conceptions that have grown out of different social conditions (Frankel 2000; Jayal 2001, 9; Taylor 2007; Nugent 2008). In Trysts with Democracy, we analyse those clusters of political practices that combine to constitute democracy and democratic processes in South Asia. We do this by asking how democratic values are embedded in social and political institutions in South Asia, and how widely held 'everyday' political values inform the multiple ways in which democracy is imagined, understood and appropriated.

When Karl Marx surveyed British India, he dismissed its village communities as 'the solid foundation of Oriental despotism' (Marx 2000, 16–17). Since then democracy has acquired considerable temporal depth on the Indian Subcontinent. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, elections to municipalities and district boards were initiated under British rule. Autonomous and responsible provincial legislative councils were created around the First World War and fully developed with the Government of India Act in 1935. In Sri Lanka universal suffrage was already in place before Ceylon became independent (Richardson and Samarasinghe 1998), while independence brought universal adult suffrage to India. In 2008, a century and a half after Marx's observation, a Lokniti political science association team surveyed the state of democracy in South Asia and found the once solid foundation of Oriental despotism apparently crumbling. Fully 88 percent of those surveyed now held democracy to be a suitable form of government for their country. But the same survey also found that only 9 percent had an unqualified preference for democracy. The rest were 'weak democrats' who held that military dictatorship, monarchy, rule by technocratic elites or by non-elected leaders might also be suitable forms of government (State of Democracy in South Asia. A Report 2008, 11–13). The spectre of democracy has been set free in South Asia, but it is still far from being the only game in town. Like the ancient ruins dotting the subcontinent, the social facts of dynastic rule, caste dominance, and religious authority still play a political role. This is hardly surprising. As Barfield reiterates in his recent book on Afghanistan's political history, politics was never for the people at large. The emirs and sultans who ruled the region in the past relied on those who were in their service, but the throne itself remained a dynastic monopoly because succession rules limited the number of contenders for the throne to a small number of heirs who, in turn, often engaged in bloody tanistry before the final victor would emerge (Barfield 2010, 88). Exclusionary rules of succession kept the number of competitors low. Under colonial rule, on the other hand, democracy gradually increased the number of competitors for political office, and hence also increased the threat of political instability. Yet, by and large democratic procedures and institutions have – if not abrogated by military rule – ensured orderly and non-warlike transfers of power.

The anthology Trysts with Democracy presents empirically detailed and theoretically stimulating articles that explore and analyse institutions and values salient in understanding both formal as well as everyday political practices in South Asia. It proceeds from the assumption that scholars working on South Asia often need to rework existing analytic concepts or develop new ones appropriate to social and political structures indigenous to the subcontinent. Following this dictum the articles in this volume approach the interrelated issues of democracy and political practice in South Asia from a cross-disciplinary point of view to revisit, challenge and transform theories about the South Asian tryst with democracy.

One Man One Vote does not Mean All Men are Equal

Robin Fox (1967, 10) once observed that 'kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art; it is the basic discipline of the subject'. Likewise, electoral studies are what make political science tick. Indeed, free and fair elections define what democracy is in a formal sense. As an important element of political practice more vital to democracy than sex to marriage, elections and the seemingly straightforward act of 'voting' signify and concretise democracy. Despite the centrality of voting to the maintenance of the everyday political machine, the last three decades have seen a decline in the study of elections and elected bodies within the field of anthropology (Gupta 2005, 184). By contrast, this volume devotes several chapters to these pivotal democratic procedures and practices, and the meanings with which they are imbued in the South Asian context.

In his opening contribution, Pedersen takes us through the history of formal or procedural democracy in India and the theoretical debates that have sought to explain its rise and perseverance. Pedersen shows how despite their obvious substantive links, the two debates have existed in almost complete mutual isolation. This has meant that, ironically, the contemporary and ongoing debate on the stability of India's democracy has very few links to the debate on the historical reasons for the introduction of democracy in the first place. Pedersen also documents how the debates on Indian democracy often seem to have been more influenced by popular current theoretical paradigms than by a process of cumulative learning, and he suggests that:

'It is much more likely...