Ramraksha: Ram-ifying the Society and Modi-fying the State 149in the state policies and take part in the gross social injustice.^7 Describ-
ing the events in his country as "cultural revolution," Vaclav Havel said
that "what is most important about this revolution is what the students
began with. It is its humanitarian dimension."^8 But then the civil society's
struggle may not be the same everywhere. Differentiating between Soli-
darity's decade-long struggle in Poland, the 1956 Hungarian-type rebel-
lion in China in 1989, and the triggering factors of the society toppling
the state in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, David Strand
argues that the nature of civil society differs substantially from country to
country "without losing the common denominator of independence, or
potential independence, against state power which lies at the heart of the
concept."^9
Our interest in civil society here is in relation to the pluralism of India
that has given rise to negative political manifestations in the form of scores
of communal conflicts and interethnic rivalries. Even as the identities that
provide meaning to people result in parochial sentiments, the Indian state
desperately tries to create national integration and fails to see Indians hav-
ing different and conflicting identities and interests. Thus the nationalistic
discourse preempts civil society, and the civil society falls victim to com-
munalism. This leaves not much political space for the different ethnic
communities in India to negotiate their positions and compromise their
civic values constantly. After all, civil society cannot be identified with
institutional arrangements or legislative guarantees.
Will the onset of the liberalization of the Indian economy and the arrival
of transnational capital create the much-needed political space for vari-
ous communities in the Indian society? While the laissez-faire conser-
vatives fantasize about "the autonomous performance of the economic
realm," Marxists believe in "planning functions by the party state" and
total control.^10 Will the bourgeois equality that dissociates political values
from social morality and gives rise to a structure and processes in which
the rich and powerful enjoy disproportionate opportunities and use the
machinery for their own interests^11 help bring about Indian civil society?
Dipesh Chakrabarty rightly contends that "in countries such as ours, sev-
eral contradictory struggles have to fuse into one. The struggle to be a
'citizen' must be part of the struggle to be a 'comrade.' We have to fight
for 'equality' at the same time as we try to criticize and transcend the bour-
geois version of it. Giving up these battles means embracing an illiberal,
authoritarian, hierarchical social order in the name of socialism."^12
Claiming that "India defies simple generalizations or easy projections"
and analyzing "the weak-strong state" of India, Rudolph and Rudolph
contend that the Indian state has alternated between autonomous and
reflexive relations with the society over the past decades since indepen-
dence. As the centrist pattern of partisan politics marked by secularism,
socialism, democracy, mixed economy, and nonaligned foreign policy