Book Review: Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Svaraj, by Aakash Singh Rathore

• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Author: Stuart Gray
• Date: 01 August 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718767119
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

598 Political Theory 47(4)

project (chapter 3). Positioning racial solidarity as an impediment to integra-

tion, she argues, does not recognize that until the polity has shed white privi-

lege and problematic forms of intersubjective relations, black solidarity is

necessary and valuable. Because black solidarity emerges from the reality of

bonds built upon a history of racial oppression, we cannot ask blacks to let go

of these bonds, their normative and political value, and the communal institu-

tions built upon them (110). Moreover, racial solidarity does not stabilize or

entrench racial difference, as critics of identity politics note, but rather aims

to destabilize hegemonic views of blackness (108). Through this analysis

Stanley also contests the role that identification with a nationwide commu-

nity plays in existing accounts of integration. While acknowledging the

importance of broader forms of identification in creating support for integra-

tion, she notes that expecting identification with the broader community,

when this community is disrespectful of segregated groups, is unrealistic.

Stanley proposes, instead, that all the political community can request from

blacks is “aspirational solidarity,” that is, “a paradoxical sense of loyalty and

commitment to something that we cannot yet see or feel” except in fugitive

moments or exceptional spaces (117–18). If aspirational solidarity is weak, it

is because the present of segregation makes a future of equality seem distant

and improbable. This improbability, however, can be more fairly tied to the

present of injustice than to the strength of black solidarity (118).

An Impossible Dream? is a thoroughly researched and original intervention

in the scholarship on integration that combines a realistic account of the dif-

ficulties of this project with a normative imperative to pursue it. Stanley’s

account rightly underlines that integration cannot succeed without a radical

redistribution of power in the polity and a mutual psychic transformation of

citizens, thus making justice an imperative of integration. Stanley’s book is a

great achievement that will enrich the debate on the question of integration

and open the door for more nuanced accounts of racial (in)justice that theo-

rize its inescapable political economic dimensions alongside the normative.

Indian Political Theory: Laying the Groundwork for Svaraj, by Aakash Singh Rathore.

New York: Routledge Press, 2017, 222 pp.

Reviewed by: Stuart Gray, Politics, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718767119

Political theory has seen its geographic focus expand increasingly beyond

traditions of western political thought in recent decades, often under