Challenges of Governing India

The book under review is a serious attempt to revisit the crucial decade of the 1940s, the era of transition from one mode of governing toanother—from colonial to the postcolonial—in order to capture and analyse various fault lines or challenges of governing India. Ideas and Frameworks of Governing India by Ranabir Samaddar is part of a two-volume series on the study of governance in a postcolonial society like India.

Samaddar starts with a proposition that the study of the processes of governance in a postcolonial society is an essential aspect of the study of democracy in such a society. Together, these two volumes, he claims, are an extension of two previous works: Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India and New Subjects and New Governance in India brought out by theCalcutta Research Group (CRG) in 2012. In these works, the political and ideological aspects of governance are combined with the technological aspects, which, according to Samaddar, are missing in many studies on governance in a postcolonial democracy like India. The business of governance in India, although an essential part of political rhetoric since the beginning of the republic, is marred by many complexities and asymmetries, both at the level of ideas as well as at the level of governing frameworks and structures.