Partha Chatterjee’s political society, Hindu democratic agency, and the West Bengal verdict of 2026

The Framework and Its Horizon

For more than two decades, Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) distinction between civil society and political society has done more to clarify the actual texture of democracy in postcolonial societies than almost any other conceptual contribution in South Asian political thought. Its genius lay in a refusal to condescend. Where liberal political theory saw only citizens behaving irrationally – voting for the wrong reasons, organizing around the wrong identities, refusing to perform the frictionless calculations of the rational-choice voter – Chatterjee saw communities negotiating their survival. They came to the state not as abstract individuals bearing rights, but as populations: jute workers, slum-dwellers, sharecroppers, fishing communities, those without titles to land they had occupied for generations. They petitioned, bargained, defied eviction orders, assembled outside local party offices, struck deals with ward councillors, cultivated relationships with district-level administrators. They were not citizens in the thin juridical sense. They were the governed, and they had developed an extraordinarily sophisticated politics of the governed.

The concept was, in the deepest sense, an act of democratic generosity toward those whom liberal theory had failed to recognize. It said: look again, this is also politics, this is also rationality, this too is an exercise of agency within the conditions actually available.

But frameworks, however capacious, have horizons. And the horizon of political society has always been, in some measure, the boundary of distribution. The governed seek entitlements. They negotiate material accommodation. The state remains the source of benefits, and political participation is organized largely around securing a better position within the distributional order that the state maintains. The framework is, structurally speaking, a framework of claimants.

What happens when the governed cease to be claimants and become, instead, custodians: not of what the state owes them, but of what the nation itself must remain?

The 2026 West Bengal election does not merely stress-test that framework. It ruptures it. And the rupture is worth understanding with the seriousness it demands.

The Asymmetry of Granted Agency

There is an asymmetry embedded deep within much progressive political theory, rarely stated explicitly but always operative, that must be named before it can be examined. It runs approximately as follows: subaltern political agency is authentic when it takes the form of demands for welfare, reservations, land rights, wages, recognition, or local negotiation. It becomes suspect – manufactured, mobilized, deluded – when it takes the form of nationalism, civilizational concern, anxiety about borders, or claims of collective identity under threat.

Under this asymmetry, a landless agricultural laborer who demands fair wages is exercising genuine democratic agency. The same laborer, if he votes on the basis of concern about illegal immigration from Bangladesh transforming the demographic character of his district, is suddenly the object of elite manipulation rather than a subject of political judgment. His economic calculation is credited; his civilizational anxiety is pathologized.

The intellectual difficulty with this position is not minor. It is, at its root, self-contradictory. If citizens possess the rational capacity to evaluate their material interests in complex distributional environment, that is, to navigate patronage networks, calculate the value of different electoral promises, compare the performance of successive governments on welfare delivery, then on what conceivable basis should they be presumed incapable of forming judgments about what they perceive as national interests? If democratic agency is real, it cannot be selectively switched on when voters produce outcomes approved by academics and switched off when they do not.

The masses are deemed intelligent enough to calculate subsidies but not intelligent enough to form judgments about the nation. A democracy cannot operate on such selective recognition of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)