Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia.

• Author: Zitrin, Stephen M.
• Position: Review

Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia Asma Barlas (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995) 241 pp.

How could two countries that were once part of the same political unit and shared the same history be partitioned into two very different regimes, one basically democratic, the other wracked by authoritarianism, coups and military rule? Democracy, Nationalism, and Communalism: The Colonial Legacy in South Asia seeks to answer this question via a political sociology of colonial India. Its author maintains that the different roles given to the Muslim and Hindu communities by the British, and the explicitly divisive policies that the colonial administrators practiced during their rule, contributed to the two divergent post-independence forms of authority: a relatively stable and democratic regime in India, and a series of chaotic and repressive ones in Pakistan. The histories of the Congress ,party and the Muslim League are traced, culminating in Congress's relative success at coalition building, versus the Muslim League's insufficient ability to connect with its political base. Barlas' reasoning is that:

...the basis of Indian democracy was not simply the introduction of representative institutions, or British rule of law and dispensation (i.e., the nature of political society) since, if these had been its only real foundation, the Muslims who were privy to the same law, institutions, and dispensation would also have been able to sustain "democracy" in Pakistan. That they could not had to do with the nature of the relationship between the dominant and subaltern classes. (p. 199) Barlas draws on Gramsci's concept of hegemony, the idea that an elite does not rule simply by force, but more often through ideological and non-coercive methods that enable it to unite a people across class lines. Hegemony helps explain the power of nationalism, a phenomenon mat has long bedeviled Marxists. As one Marxist, Etienne Balibar, observed, the idea of national unity functions "to relativize the idea of class conflict, if not to deny its very existence."(1) In non-Marxist language, one can say, as sociologist Liah Greenfeld does, that in a nationalist ideology, "a stratified national population is perceived as essentially homogeneous, and the lines of status and class as superficial."(2)

Barlas argues that Muslim elites were never sufficiently able to link their political authority to their constituency An ossified Muslim...