The Decline of Indian Political Thought – A Response to Yogendra Yadav’s search for Indian political thinkers

Yogendra Yadav’s two successive articles in the Indian Express (can be found here and here) have generated much debate within the field of contemporary Political Science. Unfortunately, various responses to his articles have focussed on whether political thought has declined or not, or who should be included in the category of political thinker. These questions digress us from making a real prognosis of the issue. While I agree with Yogendra Yadav’s premise that there has been a steady decline of the field of Indian Political Thought, I believe it requires a degree of introspection on the part of the older generation of political scientists, theorists and practitioners to truly understand the scope of the problem and find substantive solutions to reviving this tradition. These questions need to be asked of Yogendra Yadav and his contemporaries who inherited a rich tradition, but could not pass it on to the next generation.

There are four broad inter-related reasons that I believe have diminished political thought in India – failure to dismantle structures of power, gatekeeping practices, poor institutional legacy and a Eurocentric pedagogy.

Restrictive Structures of Power and Academic Gatekeeping

Yogendra Yadav is right when he links the sorry state of our politics today with the decline of the field of political science. However, political thoughts and ideas will remain irrelevant and disengaged from political practice if they fail to question prevailing structures of power. Most of the mainstream or dominant India Political thought at this moment is built on those very structures it ought to be challenging and dismantling. That is one of the reasons most analysis fails to have an electrifying impact on the political imagination.

For instance, look at any department of Political Science in any of the state universities. Renowned academics, through domestic and foreign academic networks, regularly extract the unpaid labour of political science students from these universities, rarely giving them any credit in their work. There is no way Yogendra Yadav isn’t aware of this decades old practice.

This is a system perpetuated by the so-called political thinkers. The result is as expected – “the poverty of political imagination, understanding and judgement” – as  Yogendra Yadav puts it so succinctly. The “atrophy” he points towards is not by accident, but by design. It is an “atrophy” first and foremost of political space – where the best and the brightest are not provided with sufficient space to contribute. Rohit Vemula perhaps represented how extreme this shrinking of space has been. It is a direct consequence of the tight networks that prevent “outsiders” from reaching their true potential. Even in his unfortunate death, Rohit Vemula wrote a letter that left a far greater impact on political thought and practice than any other treatise on politics I have read by an Indian scholar in recent times. Entry into politics as well as within political science academia remains tightly governed by gatekeepers, both within and outside India, resulting in the decline of both these domains. Today, it is easier for an independent scholar of political science to present their paper at a conference in Europe, than at a domestic conference where personal and institutional affiliations are more essential than the content of their research paper.

Another visceral display of this power imbalance was witnessed during the #MeToo moment in academia in 2017. A crowdsourced list by a female Dalit scholar kicked a hornets’ nest when it named and shamed established names, including in the field of Political Science, even though it hardly scratched the surface of rampant sexism within Indian academia. Sharp divides emerged between self-proclaimed Indian feminists, as one side instantly came out in support of “due process” without fully acknowledging the difficult intersectional labyrinth of power women in academia have to navigate in order to climb the ladder. After all the back and forth debates, any sustainable change to predatory behaviour within academic institutions has remained elusive. Is this not a legacy that we have inherited from the previous generation of scholars?

Clearly, there are imbalances of power governed by caste, gender, class and ethnicity which cannot be brushed aside by labelling them “generational shifts” or “culture wars”. This reality faced by every other student languishing in Indian universities should be more than evident to those who teach, research and deconstruct concepts of “power” and “positionality” for a living. There are tight exclusionary networks of political scientists, commentators and academics who thrive by promoting each other (through endorsing each other’s work, sharing conference panels, etc). Such gatekeeping eventually begets mediocrity, while keeping genuine talent from advancing and reaching the mainstream.

Poor Institutional Legacy  

When we lament about criminalization of politics in India, we duly speak about institutional failures and the inability of post-colonial leaders to groom and prepare the next generation of leaders. This also applies to the state of political science academia in India, which has suffered in the hands of institutional failures and the inability of post-colonial academics to open up the field to the best and the brightest.

For instance, why aren’t there sufficient peer reviewed journals in various sub-fields of political science based in India? Why have we reduced entry into research programmes to objective type exams such as the UGC-JRF/NET? A cursory look at the UGC-JRF/NET paper of political science will give anybody an idea about how the higher education system has failed miserably to promote original thinking by embracing rote learning through MCQ-based tests.

This points to a failure of the older generation of academics to build viable institutions, resulting in poor quality of knowledge production and the migration of social science talent to foreign universities.

A Eurocentric pedagogy

Indian curriculum on political science, designed by experts in this field, has neither kept up with new emerging ideas and concepts, nor changed its Eurocentric orientation. Thinkers from the Global South, whose ideas are perhaps more relevant to make sense of our contemporary politics, are only briefly touched upon in Political Science curriculum, nor are their ideas adopted and contextualised by political commentators as often as those of Global North thinkers. Decolonising the curriculum is underway in North American and European Universities, while there are rarely any discussions around this in Indian universities.

I absolutely agree with Yogendra Yadav when he says that “the academic mode of thinking about politics is geared towards the demands and fads of global academia.” English language national newspapers are filled with commentaries and opinions written by people who are far removed from the grassroot realities of India, but hold an academic position in one of the prestigious North American or European University. The disconnect from political reality and the Eurocentrism in their analysis is often palpable.

Latin America, Africa and West Asia have managed to produce some brilliant and original political thinkers in the last 50 years, such as Frantz Fanon (1925-61), Edward Said (1935-2003), Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), Paulo Freire (1921-97), the “deprofessionalized intellectual” Julius Nyerere (1922-99), Anibal Quijano (1928-2018), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1931-), Gustavo Esteva (1936-2022), Walter Rodney (1942-80), Paulin Hountondji (1942-2024) and Achille Mbembe (1957-), to name just a few. These were/are pioneers in decolonial thought, critical theory and neo-Marxism. Their theories and ideas were rooted in finding solutions to their unique problems, most of which emanated from the colonial and neo-colonial condition. Our Eurocentric pedagogy, passed on by the previous generation of political scholars, has made it difficult to engage with this pluriverse of ideas – something our intellectual forefathers could seamlessly do – and develop our own vocabulary of politics.

This failure to construct a truly India-centric political thought in contemporary times has not only led to deintellectualization of the political discourse but also created space for illiberal forces to capture the political narrative and imagination. For instance, in recent times, the emancipatory decolonisation narrative has ironically been captured and politically deployed by the reactionary right-wing forces in India.

My intention is not to lay the blame entirely at the feet of the previous generation of scholars. Nor do I consider an entire generation of political science scholars and academicians as a homogenous group. Many of them have done their bit to take the field forward through breakthrough research, institution building and promoting equity in their personal capacity. My objective instead is to present a view from other stakeholders in the field who are rarely heard, yet they continue to suffer powerlessly within the system they have inherited. I and millions of other students and young researchers of Indian politics remain committed to an honest reckoning of the state of political thought and discourse, which clearly will be incomplete without introspection on how we got here in the first place. 

Minu Jain has studied M.Sc. in Political Economy of Emerging Markets (King’s College, London) and M.A. in Political Science. She works as a Senior Researcher at the Unique Foundation (Pune) and is deeply committed to democratisation and decolonisation of Indian academia.