ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 describes how factional politics and corruption became prevalent in the politico-economic sphere. The downward spread of democracy in India was linked to populism based on the redistribution of wealth by the state. This led to people fighting for shares in state resources through factional politics. Core members of factions belonged to the dominant castes, reflecting the power structure of local society. The existence of factional politics is lamented in the village as one of the prime examples of corrupted modernity, where the struggle for personal gain rather than the harmony of the community is given importance. It is considered a manifestation of the social deterioration characteristic of the declining age of kaḷi juga (the age of corruption). While such a negative evaluation is made about factional politics from the viewpoint of the moral community, it is also true that people accept and adopt the practices of bribery and embezzlement as being necessary in the world of the political economy. Factional politics, in fact, exemplifies people’s agency to adapt to new opportunities for political participation under electoral democracy. Ironically, the development of factional politics in postcolonial India epitomises the diffusion of the idea and institution of democracy, where more people can imagine exercising some influence in the distribution of state resources. However, factional politics is often carried out according to the logic of majority formation where electoral votes are sought at the expense of the rights of minorities and the public good. This is a typical example of the paradox of democracy in India, namely, the incongruity between the institutional logic of democratic forms and the logic of popular mobilisation. In this light, the agenda for postcolonial India is to mediate democratic institutions and values with embodied cultural ethics, which also involves the issue of how to overcome the colonial dichotomy between the socio-cultural sphere and the politico-economic sphere.
