"In the Name of Politics"

The histories of sovereignty and democracy in India have taken a route different from the trajectory adopted by some western countries. In India, colonial sovereignty was often reduced to domination, yet ?internal wars? waged on the basis of religious, caste or even linguistic divisions, continued. Post-colonial India remains thus, a social body perpetually traversed by relations of war. As this article argues, neither colonial rule, nationalism nor even democracy in India has seen the production of a sovereignty necessary for the construction of a ?society? amenable to disciplinary power and its politics. Indian democracy thus furnishes an interesting case where the political task of creating the typically modern mix of ?sovereignty? (rights) and disciplinary domination arises not before but after the coming of universal adult franchise and a democratic polity.