Book: FOR A JUST REPUBLIC: THE PEOPLE OF INDIA AND THE STATE
Author: Partha Chatterjee
Published by: Permanent Black/ Ashoka University
Price: Rs 1195
In December, 2019, the Indian Parliament passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, explicitly allowing non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring Islamic countries an expedited path to citizenship. For the first time in Indian history, religion became the formal criterion for citizenship in what had been, at least nominally, a secular republic.
The ruling camp made the ‘chronology’ clear: a subsequent National Register of Citizens would place illegal residents (read Muslims) at the mercy of the State, to be dealt with as it pleased. Protests erupted across the country. Students occupied university campuses and women staged sit-ins that lasted months. Even those placed on the fence of political impartiality poured into the streets. Media trials branded the protesters ‘anti-nationals’. Ruling party members openly incited mobs, demanding they ‘shoot the traitors’. And then the pandemic arrived, and with it, lockdowns that doubled as a political tourniquet, stanching the flow of the protest by making gathering itself illegal.
In September 2020, the government rammed through three agricultural laws using undemocratic, coercive measures in the Rajya Sabha. Farmers in Punjab and Haryana responded by organising what would become one of the longest-sustained protests in Indian history, camping at Delhi’s borders for over a year. Familiar patterns followed: deaths, vilification, the label of ‘terrorists’ applied to those who fed the nation.
In May 2023, ethnic violence erupted between the Meiteis and the Kukis in Manipur. Homes were razed, lives shattered, an entire state torn along ethnic fault lines. Yet the Central government largely remained calculatedly silent.
This is an India that any of its residents would recognise: the unfeeling machinery of authoritative force that a ssigns and enforces hierarchies. But how did this come to be? What allowed a democratic republic to develop such sophisticated mechanisms of exclusion and violence? These are the questions Partha Chatterjee confronts in For a Just Republic.
The book’s analytical architecture rests on a fundamental distinction, that between the nation-state and the people-nation. The former represents the formal apparatus of governance — Parliament, judiciary, bureaucracy, police — whose “history was, and continues to be, mainly produced in the English language”. The people-nation, by contrast, exists elsewhere, in the vernacular, its history “a much more fragmented, disparate, and contentious field of history writing, carried out in print from the late nineteenth century mainly in the regional languages”. There are thus two Indias running on parallel tracks.
This incompatibility gets suppressed. “The peculiarity of the Indian case,” Chatterjee writes, “lay in the fact that the official ideology refused to accept that India was a multi-national state and instead resolutely sought to replicate the nation-state model.” The imposition of Hindi as a national language, the attempted erasure of regional histories for a singular version, the current project of Hindu nationalism: these are all manifestations of the nation-state’s desire to make the people-nation conform to a homogenous vision that has never matched the lived reality.
Each chapter of the book takes up a dimension of the republican project — federalism, citizenship, minority rights, capital accumulation, social justice — and asks fundamental questions. Who is a citizen? Who is a minority? What is justice? What are rights? For instance, “the question may well be asked,” Chatterjee observes, “whether the makers of India’s Constitution were using inappropriate models drawn from federations [United States, Australia, etc.] that had no resemblance to the historical and social character of the new polity that was to be organised along federal lines.”
The answer, Chatterjee suggests, is visible everywhere, whether in regional uprisings or in the gap between the promises of liberal democracy and the lived experience of political society.
Across just over 400 pages, Chatterjee synthesises Constituent Assembly debates, the political economy, regional histories, and contemporary politics into a unified analytical framework. The ambition is extraordinary; what is more extraordinary is that he largely succeeds. The book is divided into two parts: four chapters examining the nation-state (its limits, its violence, its developmental failures) and four chapters examining the people-nation (federalism, minority rights, regional capitalism, caste-class-gender formations).
By mapping the soul and the history of the Indian Republic as it is and has been, Chatterjee charts the road to a just republic. That road, he argues, requires a fundamental shift from the national to the regional, from laws as social mutation to cultural reforms that change entrenched beliefs. It demands coalition politics as the norm, insists on treating federalism seriously — asymmetrically when necessary — rather than as window dressing for centralised power. Whether such a transformation is possible in an era of authoritarian consolidation remains an open question.
For a Just Republic is a book that arrives at a moment of crisis and speaks directly to it. It insists that another India — more just, more attentive to its own plurality — remains possible. Whether we have the political will to build it is another matter entirely.