Politics and the People

Sajni Kothari has written on Indian politics-as ystem, as process, as a battleground of ideas, stitutions and personalities-for almost thirty years now. These have been years when the theoretical basis of the Indian model was laid, deviances from it citiqued, its later erosion and undermining exposed, and issues involved in both 'restoring the political process and restructuring it to meet new challenges (two constant themes in Kothari's writings) raised.

A great believer in the role of democratic politics, in both the processes of transformation aimed at greater equity and justice and the processes of preservation and sustenance of deeper roots and traditions, Kothari has been persistently working at the interplay of politics and society, the 'system' and the people, the 'macro' and 'micro' dimensions, and the interventionist and the retentive aspects of Indian reality. His earlier work on these various facets focussed more on institutional structures and the policy process and the social and cultural underpinnings of the same. This resulted in his first major work, Politics in India, which appeared in 1970. Almost before the ink was dry on this book, the Indian political system was subjected to wholly new pressures of a populist and plebiscitary kind on the one hand and new upsurges of agitational politics on the other. This led to a new genre of writings from this author and produced a large array of both analytical and action-oriented work. All this induced important departures in his choice of themes and issues, the theoretical framework thereof, as well as in methdological orientation and normative perspective. This work is still evolving as his recent writings indicate and has not yet led to a definitive work like Politics in India.

The author intends to work on this in the coming years. In the meanwhile he has chosen to put together select sets of his writings at different thresholds of his intellectual journey through the diverse terrains and traumas of Indian politics. The result is this two-volume work.