This book is a clearly written, thought-provoking inquiry into India's democracy. Christine Keating begins Decolonizing Democracy with an interesting paradox: The Indian constitution sought to build an inclusive democracy by declaring the equality of gender, race, caste, and religion, yet it allowed for the legal subordination of women and the political marginalization of women and minorities. Rather than blaming the natural desire and ability of one group to dominate another, Keating explains the contradiction through a lucid description of what she calls the “politics of compensatory domination,” where political authorities build consent to their rule by enabling intergroup and intragroup rule. In other words, the impulse to rule is constructed, and state actors use ideological conditioning (alongside force) to pressure dominant members of a subordinate group to exercise command and manufacture consent from other members. Not only does this book aim to expand critical social contract theory by incorporating India's postcolonial experience, but it also offers a normative argument that any efforts to make our political relations more democratic must include challenges to the politics of compensatory domination. To these ends, Keating analyzes the terms of British colonial rule in India, India's independent constitution and surrounding debates in the Constituent Assembly, and some contemporary resistance movements that aim to deepen India's democracy.
Perhaps most useful for this reader is Keating's articulation of two forms of British colonial governance: the paternal patriarchal versus the fraternal approach. The former and more commonly analyzed form refers to political authority that rejects indigenous ways as uncivilized, asserts a natural right of command, and justifies domination by offering to reform the natives. Fraternal political authority, in contrast, respects indigenous philosophy and law (as long as they do not undermine colonial rule), constructs a kinship between the ruling and the ruled, and advocates nonintervention in the private sphere (on issues such as religion and family). These latter features enable rulers to attain tacit consent from elite members of the ruled by offering inter- and intragroup domination as compensation. While compensation can presumably be offered along varying axes, Keating focuses on gender and communal domination. To attain tacit consent from elite Hindus, for example, early British rulers relied on a fraternal approach and depicted themselves as protectors of civilized Hindu culture from decades of destructive Moghul rule. British rulers' Aryan rhetoric created a racial kinship between the British and upper-caste North Indians that justified their imperial civilization effort and obviated the need for overt coercion. In addition to offering Hindu supremacy to Islam, British fraternal rule offered all brown men the right to dominate brown women under the guise of “respect for indigenous culture.” These rights to dominate along gender and communal identities were given to some Indians in return for their acquiescence to the racial domination of whites over all browns.
Keating's description of fraternal rule is more than just a sophisticated articulation of the well-known British practice of “divide and rule.” Rather, the author goes further to show how fraternal rule fostered Britain's subsequent reliance on paternal domination—thereby emphasizing the relational aspects of different forms of domination. By the 1820s, colonial rulers had turned to a more paternal approach, asserting the supremacy of Anglicanism and justifying their rule with the offer to control intragroup tensions (across community, gender, and caste) among uncivilized Indians. To make this claim, however, paternalist rulers relied on the previous faternatlist rulers, who had codified and shaped the “traditional” practices that were the object of paternalist rulers' outrage. As a result, the two forms of rule worked together to enable colonial domination, they were often simultaneously pursued, and most significantly, they could be alternated to contain dissent.
In her discussion of postcolonial forms of domination in India, Keating focuses on India's use of fraternal power. In the Constituent Assembly, the Hindu majority used a fraternal rhetoric of brotherhood across religions to overturn minority reservations, or quotas on seats, in the government. To compensate for this loss of power in the public sphere, minority religious groups attained sovereignty at home through community-specific civil codes that allowed for gender domination. Women, therefore, may have attained suffrage and equality in the constitution, but remained legally subordinated in the private sphere through unequal laws on property ownership, inheritance, marriage, and divorce. Though illuminating, the author's focus on fraternal power alone raises questions about the interaction of paternal and fraternal power in postcolonial India: Does paternal power simply not exist in India because the constitution resists colonial forms of racial and sexual exclusion, or could it reemerge once fraternal power is firmly established (as it did during the colonial rule)? Does the absence of paternal power weaken India's fraternal power in unique ways?
Promising, but less fleshed out, is Keating's analysis of efforts to resist the politics of compensatory domination in India. Much appreciated is her corrective to many researchers' denial of feminist movements during the independence struggle—which, she argues, stems from their exclusive focus on British paternal power. Instead, she shows how Indian feminist and nationalist groups came together in the early twentieth century to expose “the hollowness of British paternalist claims that they were protectors of Indian womanhood and refused fraternalist control over women as compensation for continued colonial rule” (p. 10). By opposing inter- and intragroup dominance, feminists and nationalists undermined the fulcrum of British power.
Keating then goes on to analyze how contemporary struggles for gender and minority rights in India challenge the contradictions embedded in India's constitution, or social contract. Particularly interesting is her point that the contradictions in the constitution enable different groups to compare their situations, leaving the constitution more open to challenge. What is left underanalyzed, however, is when and how these differing contradictions foster intragroup animosity, competition, and eventual cooperation. For example, Keating writes that although the struggle for the women's reservation bill was inspired by low-caste reservations, the most intense opposition came from low-caste and Muslim groups. Why do we not see the same convergence between groups that we witnessed during the nationalist movement? On the flip side, why did feminists and low-caste groups not collaborate to glean lessons from low-caste experiences in order to expose the limitations of quotas as a means to upliftment? Later, the author asserts that the women's reservation bill, eventually approved by the upper house of the Indian Parliament in 2010, “formally links women's empowerment to lower caste and minority group empowerment and challenges the fragmentation of struggles for gender justice and caste and minority rights” (p. 91); however, she does not provide the reader with the details of this process.
Perhaps most disappointing about the discussion of contemporary struggles of resistance is its focus on topics that have already been heavily discussed in contemporary literature (such as sati, the practice of widow burning, and the divorce case of Shah Bano). One axis of compensatory domination that is strikingly absent from the book is “class.” As Keating quickly acknowledges, low-caste members received reservations in the public sphere, but their backwardness was linked to the Hindu caste system, rather than to social and economic disadvantages. In what ways has class domination been used as a compensatory tool in the colonial and postcolonial eras? Is class domination in India ever asserted in paternalist ways? What forms of resistance have emerged to fight class contradictions in India? Why have we not seen convergence between class-based movements and identity-based movements?
Toward the end of the book, Keating provides an interesting view into alternative solutions arising from Indian feminists' efforts to establish “egalitarian pluralism,” a system that retains pluralism while rejecting compensatory domination and intragroup rule (of men over women). Part of the impetus for this effort arose when the Hindu Right appropriated the struggle for a universal civil code to assert communal dominance. Keating's focus on the “option” of an egalitarian civil code that can be used when and if people feel that their personal laws are discriminating against them is hypothetical and interesting, but it also raises major questions around the heavy reliance on “free choice” among vulnerable groups.
In sum, Decolonizing Democracy makes one think. It offers a refreshing framework for understanding power, and it raises many questions. For anyone interested in the complex nature of India's contemporary democracy and its swelling resistance movements, this is an important and fascinating book.
