ABSTRACT
This concluding Chapter reflects on the political ethnography of Gujjars in Meerut, Mawana, Khanpur and their neighbourhoods. The chapter shows how democratic rules and imagination have been localized, internalized, reinterpreted and deployed in contemporary Indian politics. This process is not unique to the Gujjars. Across India, for example, people share a common popular democratic language draws its symbols from geographic cosmology, everyday kinship and religious practices, ideas of kingship, masculinity, legends, nationalism, ideas of justice and from the modern Indian Constitution. Democracy becomes localized and internalized through popular ideas and available cultural resources, and then acquires different meanings, agendas and interests according to context—the castes, religious communities, movements and political parties that use and reinvent it. I argue that the dynamics between indigenous idioms of politics and global democratic discourses and practices have been the key in making democracy part of the Indian political imagination and informing the political rise of the historically marginalized groups such as Gujjars.
