Institutionalization and Style in Rajasthan Politics

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a spate of studies concerned with change, modernization and development. The differing conceptions of this phenomenon might strike one as similar to the reflections of the proverbial blind men upon the nature of the elephant. One school of thought, associated with the work of Lerner and Deutsch, has attempted to gauge modernity in terms of indices such as literacy, urbanization, access to mass media, etc.-the level of political development or modernization being conceived as a concomitant and function of scores a society would receive on these indices. Another class of efforts, which has drawn heavily upon selected aspects of Weber and Durkheim, has conceived modernization in terms of the increasing structural differentiation and functional specificity of roles in a society. Yet another approach, usually associated with the work of Talcott Parsons, has been to describe and show difference between tradition and modernity by using the pattern variables as criteria. Others have been primarily exercises in historical exegesis under a new and fashionable name. Although necessary and useful for the task of establishing descriptive criteria for the comparison of societies and polities, these conceptions appear to be inadequate in accounting for the continuity or collapse of social and political systems, even given systems which would get a more or less high rating on any of these scales. They do not account for phenomena such as social and political integration, legitimation, and institutionalization. This essay is a brief and preliminary attempt at analyzing the process of political institutionalization and styles of political action which have characterized Rajasthani politics over the past few decades. By political institutionalization is meant the development of accepted and routinized rules, procedures and patterns of behavior which permits the successful absorption of new configurations of political claimants and political demands in a given institutional sphere. In this conception, modernization is not a finite quality or process, but is continual. By political style is meant the manner and norms which regulate the way in which political beliefs are applied in politics and the way in which political goals are pursued. The bulk of the essay will focus upon these twin phenomena in the Rajasthan Congress Party. In so doing we will focus upon the mobilization of cosmopolitan elites in the early protest movements and the changed configuration of political organization and style since independence. The predominant groups in Rajasthan politics, both inside and outside