Once There Was a CSDS

The story of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) spelt out in the Outlook and Seminar magazine issues recently, creates a simple frame. To me what made CSDS famous was that it was a quarrel, a conversation and one with much causality. The CSDS was one of the serious attempts to construct a social science outside economics, which could provide a different imagination for democracy in India. Visualised by Rajni Kothari, Gopal Krishna and other scholars, the CSDS grew as a part of the Nehruvian imagination, an attempt to professionalise electoral studies. Inspired by American social s­cience and especially by scholars like Robert Dahl, Karl Deutsch and Myron Weiner, the CSDS created a world of electoral studies as a social style combining quantitative rigour and analytical insight.

Election studies was method, a technique, a site for the drama of social science and democracy and of the choices and decisions democracy demanded. One must confess that this by itself could not have created a vision of political I­ndia in the Nehruvian era. The missing gestalt was provided by Rajni Kothari’s classic book Politics of India. Horribly written and superbly analysed, it provided a masterwork that people could attack and praise. It was a landmark and still remains a milestone in the annals of politics. In this book, Rajni took over the key ideas of Gopal Krishna, that the Congress was a coalition of interests and represented a notion of plural India. The Congress as a microcosm of India sustained the idea of Nehruvian India. Politics of India gave Indian political science a masterwork, a claim to identity, a flag, a totemic identity, a sense of a paradigm and an exemplar.