Partha Chatterjee is one of the most recognisable figures in the big bazaar of scholarship on Indian politics. Among his contemporaries in subaltern studies, he is perhaps the only one who continues to explicitly draw upon Antonio Gramsci while analytically responding to the growing dominance of the far right in India. Not surprisingly, his recent and arguably most expansive book, For a Just Republic, has attracted wide circulation and generous acclaim.

As a long-standing reader of Chatterjee’s oeuvre, I felt an intimate connection between this book and several of the conceptual tropes he developed earlier, particularly in Bengal: The Land Question (1984). In the long preface to that work, Chatterjee had elaborated a foundational split in the domain of politics: between “one organised according to legal-political principles laid down by the state and the other lying outside it”. He argued that dominant historiographies either ignore or actively reject the existence of an autonomous political domain in which “the people” confront an expanding state power and resist incorporation into its legal and political frameworks.

In For a Just Republic, Chatterjee returns to this distinction, situating it within a longue durée history of nation-state formation itself. The book can be read as an attempt to demonstrate how the history of organised nation-state formation in India has simultaneously been the history of a distinct, autonomous, and resistant people–nation. It is around these two intertwined but antagonistic politico-historical formations, i.e. the nation-state and the people-nation, that the book is thematically organised. The latter, understood as a politico-cultural expression of popular consciousness, is plural, vernacular, and historically sedimented. In this book, it is this people-nation that receives its most sustained and historically grounded treatment.

The book’s core ambition is to show that what are often treated as settled background structures of Indian politics—the normative architecture of constitutionalism, citizenship, minority rights, capital accumulation under electoral democracy, federalism, regional power distribution, and even theories of justice—are in fact outcomes of protracted political struggles, strategic manoeuvres, and contingent compromises. It thus serves as a sustained interrogation of the sense of finality that often accompanies normative power arrangements and national imaginaries in the study of India.

Methodologically, Chatterjee remains a theorist of the present. As in his earlier work, analysis here is inseparable from questions of political strategy. For him, understanding contemporary politics is always linked to the problem of how it might be transformed. From this vantage point, Chatterjee’s account of Indian politics foregrounds the regional imagination as central to the constitution of popular collectivities. He suggests that the relative autonomy of regional political imaginations, rooted in their deeper social and cultural histories, has functioned as a bulwark against the homogenising and authoritarian ambitions of the nation state. In the current conjuncture, he extends this argument to suggest that such regional pluralism could act as a structural constraint on the hegemonic project of Hindutva.

This line of reasoning in some sense reminds one of older debates on liberty and revolution, particularly those associated with Burkean arguments about the value of intermediary institutions and alternative loci of power as safeguards against absolutism. One is also reminded of the influential thesis advanced by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, and later echoed by scholars such as Paul Brass, that Indian politics gravitates towards centrism and coalition-building precisely because of the fact of its deeper social fragmentation.

Despite important differences, these perspectives converge on the idea that the “normal” condition of Indian democracy has been coalitional—or, in Chatterjee’s suggestion, “consociational”—and that this equilibrium has been destabilised over the past decade and a half by the gigantic rise of the BJP. This, he argues, can have catastrophic consequences as it threatens to undermine the “stability of nation-state and vitality of people-nation”, which are based on the deeper recognition of “the idea of a federation of equal parts”.

While it is true that a noticeable rightward shift has taken place in Indian politics, Chatterjee is not the first one to point this out. The implicit suggestion that this shift is primarily driven by and for a Hindi-speaking, dominant-caste, male agenda is analytically too simplistic and diverts our attention from the more complex structural shifts reshaping the landscape of Indian politics.

The vernacularisation of the right

This latter claim is likely to attract the strongest disagreements. First, there exists a sustained critique of whether India can meaningfully be described as a consociational democracy, either in form or substance. To the contrary, more recent scholarship, notably that of Tripurdaman Singh and Pratinav Anil, has traced the authoritarian roots of Indian democracy back to its foundational moments, arguing that the sphere of civic action in India has always historically remained subject to executive order and control.

Second, if one were to accept Chatterjee’s claim that Hindutva majoritarianism and Hindi domination are inseparable, it would lead to the conclusion that any further expansion of the BJP’s power would inevitably provoke resistance from non-Hindi-speaking regions. This claim, however, sits uneasily with recent electoral evidence.

Despite aggressively advancing its core ideological agenda, the BJP has increased its vote share in parts of southern, eastern, and north-eastern India, even as it faced a more competitive contest in the 2024 general election. Notably, some of the most “virulent” right-wing intellectuals, such as Vikram Sampath, Sai Deepak, Anand Ranganathan, and Swapan Dasgupta, hail from non-Hindi-speaking regions, while the BJP’s most shocking setback came from Uttar Pradesh in 2024.

This leads to a deeper and more troubling question that haunts Chatterjee’s strategic optimism: Is the regional character of the people-nation sufficient to prevent the vernacularisation of Hindutva? Given that Hindutva appears to be shedding its linguistic anxieties, does this framework remain valid? The uncomfortable reality is that the rightward shift in Indian politics is no longer confined to upper castes and elites; it now includes visible sections of subaltern groups across regions. This expansion of its social base complicates the assumption that popular politics, especially in its vernacular and regional forms, will necessarily act as a site of resistance. Rather, it suggests that majoritarian politics itself is being vernacularised and locally embedded.

This development not only renders older analytical frames inadequate but also underscores a sobering insight articulated by scholars like Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who suggest that the contemporary moment of statism of Indian democracy is simultaneously a moment of popular sovereignty: a popular sanction for the absolute power of the unitary state. In this sense, the relationship between people and the state is not one of straightforward antagonism but of complex alignment. Relatedly even in terms of strategy, recent interventions by Ajay Gudavarthy warn that an excessive emphasis on particularistic identities can culminate in what he terms “secular sectarianism”, undermining the emergence of broader solidarities necessary to counter the pan-Indian reach of the BJP.

For a Just Republic is a work that compels readers to rethink the relationship between people, nation, and the state in India. Its greatest strength is that it recovers a historically grounded conception of popular politics that resists statist reduction. Yet the book’s strategic wager—that regional pluralism and the people-nation can still serve as an effective counterweight to an adaptive and expanding Hindutva project—remains open to serious empirical and theoretical challenge. 

Supriy Ranjan is an assistant professor of political science at GITAM University, Hyderabad.

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