Elusive Democracy

The book offers a comprehensive historical and ethnographic account of democratic incorporation as experienced by Dalit (ex-Untouchable) activists in India.

Today, India is widely celebrated as the world's largest democracy. This book tells the untold story of how Dalit activists transformed a civil rights movement into a political party. Drawing on original interviews with longtime activists, the book chronicles their fraught transition into electoral democracy, and it complicated afterlife.Today, India is widely celebrated as the world's largest democracy. However, not all groups experience India's political institutions the same way. This book draws on extensive interviews with longtime Dalit (ex-Untouchable) activists and original archives of party documents to explore the democratic transformation of one of India's most prominent Dalit-led parties, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK; Liberation Panthers Party). Through a historical and ethnographic account of the VCK's transition from boycotts to ballots, this book provides a novel perspective on India's democratic trajectory, as well as its limits. Whereas VCK leaders initially viewed elections as an instrument to spur development and contest power asymmetries, they would come to recognize that democratic institutions can equally function as a means of containment, and control. The research shows how democratic politics opened new space for Dalit political advancement while simultaneously imposing unique constraints on these leaders that would reconfigure very nature of their politics.