India's Little Political Tradition (original) (raw)

People across India's landscape and political spectrum deify their political leaders, subjecting them to lavish rituals of veneration. They festoon politicians with flower garlands, bedeck them with crowns and swords, enshrine them in temples and douse their murtis in milk, curds, and ghee. This happens during elections as much as between them, in cities as well as in villages, in the Communist Party as much as in the BJP. The worship of politicians is as crucial an institution of India's democracy as elections, as important to how political representatives and the people that they represent relate. Yet while political analysts devote much energy to elections, in their writings politician worship simply does not feature. Its descriptions appear in ethnographic accounts, 1 but, as far as mainstream political analysts (in journalism and academe) are concerned, this is India's quaint and quirky exotica, the stuff of religion or tradition, an element of cultural style with no political substance, meaning, or consequence. 2 And little wonder. Today's professional political analysts, whether in popular media or in academe, are heirs to ways of thinking about politics, and indeed of conceptualizing "the