Bulletin n. 3/2010
January 2011
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Mitraa Subrata
    Symbiosis, re-use and evolution: administrators, politicians, citizens, and governance in post-colonial India
    in Commonwealth and Comparative Politics , Vol. 48, issue 4 ,  2010 ,  457 – 478
    Democracy, governance and citizenship in post-colonial states are crucially contingent on how civil servants and political leaders see one another. Civil servants and political leaders are important links in the national chain of governance, joining the modern state and traditional society. A trained, professional, politically neutral bureaucracy, held accountable to local, regional and national leaders, is the core of India's strategy of governance. Based on the management of order, welfare and identity, this design underpins the vast expanses of the Indian political system, reaching out to every corner of the country, constantly extracting and circulating new ideas and resources, and functioning as the veins and arteries of this complex body politic. The evolution of this complex system, the fortuitous result of the symbiosis of administrators and politicians, and the strategic re-use of the colonial and the pre-modern past, accounts for the puzzle of the formal continuity of a colonial institution in India's post-colonial context. The article examines this argument on the basis of narratives, conversations with regional elites (the empirical analysis draws on interviews with 150 of them, drawn from six states) and findings from a cross-section survey of the Indian electorate
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