What Makes a Good Politician? Democratic Representation, ‘Vote-Buying’ and the MLA Handbook in Nagaland, Northeast India

Abstract

In this article I attempt an ethnography of democratic representation in India by examining how ordinary villagers in the north-eastern state of Nagaland relate to their politicians, what they expect of them, and what yardsticks they adopt to evaluate their performance in office. I focus on the dialectical relationship between homegrown Naga political theory and praxis, and the specificities of Nagaland state and governance to show that the form democratic representation takes there is a reflection of historical particularities and the society’s own conception and normative imagination of its political self and sociality. Provincialising liberalist projections of democratic representation, the article contributes to a promising body of creative analysis that is paving the way for a much fuller and richer understanding of existing democratic life-worlds in South Asia.